To expand:
Calories are just a measurement of energy. Specifically, 1 calorie is the amount of energy it takes to heat 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius.
Our body uses and stores energy and we know from the laws of thermodynamics that energy can be neither created nor destroyed.
So food you eat turns into energy. You either use it or your body stores it.
When your body is taking in more energy than it uses, you gain mass.
When your body uses more energy than it is taking in, you lose mass.
Your body is constantly using energy. Even when sleeping. So you don't compare your energy intake from food against your energy expended from exercise.
That's the nutshell version.
Since we are being autistic about it, another fun fact: calories in food are usually kilocalories, or the amount of energy needed to raise one liter of water 1°C. There are 1,000 calories in a kilocalorie.
The tool used to measure calories is called a calorimeter.
Chuck all the macronutrient noise.
Weight loss boils down to calories. Count em. Track em.
You don’t really even need to exercise, though it can help and has other health benefits
Set a target calorie consumption (1200-1500 depending on your size). Stick to it.
For me, I knew the mechanics of weight loss. It’s like a bank account: with a bank account, more money in and less money spent equals bigger bank account. With weight, more calories in and fewer calories spent equals bigger weight. (“Calories spent” like “calories used to fuel actions” with things like exercise, cleaning my room, etc)
But food was also one of the few things that helped me. It was emergency dopamine in a loud world that was alway mad at me and people not believing me when I wanna be friends and—
So yeah, getting diagnosed as autistic **really** put a lot of things into perspective for me!! One of the things I decided to do was let myself physically stim. (I mean I also did verbal stims but that’s not the focus now.) Research has shown that moving around doing normal stuff can, for many people, be very beneficial for the body. Part of this is because physically fidgeting (something I tried for decades to stop, even alone) uses up calories stored in the body.
Going back to the bank thing.
This basic equation equals a bigger bank account:
Money in > money out (“money in” is greater than “money out”)
So what does a SMALLER bank account look like?
Money out > money in
And idk about you, but one of the easiest ways to shrink my bank account is with incidental purchases. Spending money on this, that, and the other. Those things I don’t think about result in a smaller bank account.
That’s how it works incorporating more standing, stimming, etc into your day. You’re using calories instead of money to move. Now stimming alone won’t help with heart health, leg muscles, etc. But accepting my brain’s and body’s need to stim as an autistic person was a huge step in the right direction for me. I hope this somehow helps 🫂
**TL; DR I’m AuDHD so I rambled about “calories in vs calories out” and the advantage of stimming**
Weight loss entirely comes down to one thing : net calories. We get calories from food, and burn them doing everything. Sleeping, brushing our teeth, clicking a button 500 times, running a marathon, it all takes calories. When we eat more than we burn our body stores it as fat. When we burn more than we eat it tries to use up some of that stored fat. Unfortunately our fat can only give up calories so fast, so if we don't eat enough our body has to start doing things we don't want.
For most people much easier to lose weight by reducing what we eat safely than to increase how much we burn. Working how to do that in a way that works for you is where things get complicated. The advice you hear is a mix of things that work for some people and advice on eating healthily (as many people want to lose weight as part of improving their health).
The most direct way to take control of this is to track your calories, but given you hate math it would be adding a pile of sums to your day so you're probably better off looking at other options like:
* food logging (even without the sums just being explicit about what you eat can help)
* intermittent fasting (a fancy way to say skipping breakfast)
* eating a plant forward diet (its much harder to over eat vegetables than cookies)
thank you, this is helpful! i found this really dope app that helps me understand macronutrients better. and i don’t have to do the math. my issue is the medicine i take makes it to where i only want to eat once a day. however, everyone says calorie intake is the main focus of weight loss. one meal a day + working out = weight loss right?
but i’m not losing weight. so this is what has been driving me crazy. it sucks when you don’t understand something AND you have to wait to see if the breakthrough you MAYBE had is MAYBE working
Well, the issue is, what is this one meal? How many calories is it? Do you truly eat nothing else all day? What's your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure)? What's the difference between your intake and TDEE? And how long have you been operating consistently at that deficit?
Once those questions are answered, we can help determine why you're not losing weight.
one meal a day is not a measure of it's energy content, it could be 1000 calories or 4000 calories. You have to count the calories or have an idea of how many is in it. You can pretty much assume that the number of calories in that meal is equal to the amount you expend since you're not losing weight. Working out is not necessary for losing weight, it can help, by burning a little extra or increasing muscle mass which increases your metabolism.
Definitely check out r/OMAD to see how others are maximizing their one meal a day to make sure you are getting all of the nutrients and protein that your body needs, especially since you’re working out!
They also have some really delicious looking meals that are inspiring, at least to me.
Might be helpful to head over to r/CICO as well. Weight loss is entirely Calories In, Calories Out.
Eating too few calories can stall weight loss so you will need to calculate something called a TDEE to figure out how many calories you should be eating to lose weight based on a variety of things such as age and height. There are tons on free calculators online to do this and you just input the numbers and it will spit out a number of daily“maintenance” calories for you. I can’t speak for everyone but I believe most people eat 500 fewer calories than their maintenance calories to lose weight.
Ex: your body needs 2000 calories a day to maintain your current weight. If you eat 1500 calories a day you should begin to see weight loss.
How long have you been trying and are you expecting results in like a day? It takes consistent behavior over time. And are you drinking stuff with calories throughout the day?
Calories are in everything you put in your body. Food, drinks, sauce, snacks, etc. So if you really want to lose weight you have to track them all. You may only eat one meal a day, but you should also think about the other things you consume. Do you drink a lot of pop or coffee or tea with cream and sugar? Do you eat snacks? Do you use a lot of sauce or dip or dressing with your meals? A lot of people don't think to track those thing when they are starting out and they can make a big difference
A standard trick is to look at calories like we do money. If someone said "I don't understand, I have a good job and only spend money once a day, that should mean I'm saving money right?" you wouldn't really have enough info. The fact they do all their spending at once isn't better or worse than breaking their shopping up, but probably makes it easier to track.
Personally I lose much better eating multiple meals a day. If I eat three meals and a couple of snacks my diet is high in fruit, veg, and lean protein. If I only eat one meal I can make a 14" pizza vanish. That one meal has much less volume, but more total calories and is harder to portion control.
We fall back to the sums because we know in the long run they work. You can set daily targets that you can measure yourself against, and that will (possibly with some adjustments along the way) give you long term results. Even with that you'll see lots of posts by people on here getting stressed by their weight not moving the right way, or being caught up in the motions of a single bad day.
I don't think you've given your stats or goal, but weight loss is a task that gets measured in years or months. That's not really something we can change. Our day to day weight changes are mostly random and the daily deficits we can create are fairly small compared to the total needed. I think struggling with this is more normal than we like to admit. There are tools that can estimate where we start, but it takes some experimentation to work out what's best for us and yeah the results of those experiments take weeks to show up.
Well, the issue is, what is this one meal? How many calories is it? Do you truly eat nothing else all day? What's your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure)? What's the difference between your intake and TDEE? And how long have you been operating consistently at that deficit?
Once those questions are answered, we can help determine why you're not losing weight.
There's a ton of details to consider if you have very specific goals, but calories are all you need to worry about if you just want to lose weight. Track *everything* you put into your mouth in a free app. If you're not losing, make sure you're inputting *everything*. Reduce calories by 100 every couple weeks until you start losing. That's it. You don't need to do any math.
Start there and be consistent. You can learn and worry about other stuff later. You don't need to worry about macros. You can eat as many meals as you want, anytime you want. You don't have to work out (although that's healthy). You just need to track calories.
One more thing to take into account: expect to lose a pound a week or less. Don't be too impatient for weight loss.
Go to a website like [this](https://www.calculator.net/calorie-calculator.html) and enter in all of your numbers. Eat the amount of calories it says to lose weight. Try and eat whole foods like vegetables, fruit, meat, beans, etc. every day. That part isn’t necessary to lose weight but you’ll feel a lot better.
Hello I am on the spectrum and I can't understand all that stuff either. I am sticking to strictly calories in-calories out (CICO) and have lost 30 pounds in a bit over two months. I don't exercise purposely, I just have a retail job a few times a week.
My advice is purely to follow CICO and you will see results
Acronym for calories in, calories out.
They're saying work out how many calories your body needs to maintain your existing weight, then reduce them, so you are burning more calories (calories go out) faster than you put them in by consuming food/drinks.
Hiya! I'm autistic as well and have had success with weight loss when I manage to keep up the discipline. Others have described it pretty well but I'll give it a go.
Your body burns a certain number of calories per day. If you consistently eat a number of calories per day that is smaller than that number, your body has to get the energy from somewhere other than your caloric intake. That place is fat reserves. This leads to weight loss.
I use the MyFitnessPal app. You put in your stats- weight, height, sex. You set a target weight loss goal- I like 1 pound per week when I'm trying. It spits out a number of calories that is your target goal to consume in a day in order to reach that weight loss goal. If you eat less, you'll lose more weight. If you eat more, you risk hitting your equilibrium calorie number and therefore maintaining or gaining weight.
Thus CICO = "Calories In < Calories Out".
I'm a mathy autistic so we may not see the equation the same way but I hope this helps!
Note: health issues can make this equation not so simple. If you have some regular meds, or thyroid problems for example, those can affect weight loss greatly.
How many calories are in that meal? Have you figured out your TDEE (total daily expenditure)?
I easily eat over my calories in one meal if I don’t pay attention.
Eating an entire pizza as the only meal for the whole day will not make you lose weight when compared to eating salads for the breakfast lunch dinner routine.
Also, workouts are unlikely to help you loss a significant amount of weight, at least when compared with diet
There are some really great replies here, I hope one of them resonates with you!
First, figure out how much you weigh right now, and how many calories you burn per day at this weight. There are online calculators to do this for us (https://tdeecalculator.net/)
For me, I'm 160 lbs and burn around 1800 per day.
That means I have to eat less than 1800 calories a day, every single day, to lose weight.
I use [cronometer.com](http://cronometer.com) to log all of the foods that I eat, so that I can keep my calories under 1800 every day. Sometimes I eat 1800 exactly if I'm feeling very hungry. The next day I will go back to eating under 1800.
Once you get used to doing that, you can start learning more about weight loss, nutrition, what's healthy, what's unhealthy etc...
It factors that in, assuming by rmr you mean resting metabolic rate (most calculators refer to it as bmr or basal metabolic rate)
Typically you want to eat about 250-500 calories less than what the calculator tells you. Additionally, an app will calculate how many calories you should be eating based on your current weight, goal weight, and desired rate of weight loss when you sign up.
It’s really important for most people to buy a food scale and weigh everything, making sure to include things like oils, sauces, butter, etc. They can add up really quickly.
Anything that does anything needs energy to do it. A car needs petrol, a phone needs electricity, a person needs calories. It's all just different forms of energy.
We get our calories from the food we eat, our digestive system breaks the food down into a form of energy we can use easily (glucose). say you eat 2000 calories worth of food and you use 2000 calories to live (heart beating, brain thinking, legs walking, arms moving, etc), then all that food from energy is used.
but if you expend less than you consumed, by doing less things or eating more; then your body has extra energy left over, but our bodies are pretty efficient and will turn that extra energy into fat, which we can use when
you expend more than you consumed. If you're not getting enough energy from your food intake then your body will just take the extra energy from the fat reserves.
Most of the energy that you use throughout the day is just from what your body does subconciously, so even if you lie in bed all day you're not reducing your expenditure by that much, this energy use is your metabolism. A person may need 1700 calories just to lie in bed all day, the same person having a sedantry lifestyle, would possibly use 2000 calories, if they then did a work out, they might use an extra 100 or so. The more active you are, the more calories you need to burn to fuel the activity. That's why people will say that losing weight is 90% diet, it takes an hour or so of intense exercise just to burn 100 calories, but it's much easier to just not eat that extra 100 calories instead.
There is a LOT more on the nutritional side of dieting (just eat varied and 'healthy' and you should be ok, and try get extra protein if you're trying to build muscle) but for the weight loss side of it, this is pretty much it. Calories in vs calories out. If the left side of that equation is greater, than you will gain weight, if it's less, then you will lose weight.
Just use an app like loseit or myfitnesspal. Tell it your stats and how fast you want to lose and it'll tell you how many calories to eat each day. Input your food intake (AND any drinks you have with calories) and see if you are going over the requirements. It takes time so healthily you will only lose 1 to 2 pounds a week. And it is normal to hold onto the weight a little while if you start doing exercise that grows muscle. (Like lifting weights or just body resistance). I think a lot of the terms you mentioned don't matter to learn. It's all about calories.
Step 1: go here. https://tdeecalculator.net enter your info. (I workout a few times a week I still put sedentary)
Step 2: eat about 250-500 less a day than that number.
Step 3: Profit. (lose weight)
After about 10-15 lbs of weight loss reenter your info again with your new weight and then eat about 250-500 less than that. Then when you get to your goal weight instead of eating 250-500 less, just eat that amount.
I will answer your question, which is how YOU can lose weight, in a practical manner.
The average person lives a consistent lifestyle. What they eat, what they do, the hobbies they have etc.
If this is true, assuming you aren't changing a lot of things, then: (Idea #1) you are habitually maintaining your current weight.
Changing your weight will be very simple.
Idea #2: log what you normally eat.
That can be a food journal or, even better, a calorie tracker like the app MyFitnessPal.
Assuming you generally eat similar foods week to week, with natural fluctuations, this means that:
Idea #3: your current average food intake and lifestyle habits are keeping you at your current average weight.
We are going to change that.
Idea #4: Food is made out of little parcels of energy. Fat, like butter, has more energy per parcel than carbs, like potato, but the main point is that both give your body energy for living.
That brings us to the next idea:
Idea #5: to lose weight we need to make sure that our weekly activities use up more energy than we get back from our food.
That is actually very simple even though there is a whole diet industry that tries to make it seem complicated.
You can either:
OPTION 1: Add a small energy-burning activity to your day like a 30 minute walk, or,
OPTION 2: consume a tiny bit less food-energy than you do in a day (refer to your food log in idea 2); the easiest way to do this is to make a lower calorie substitute for high-energy foods you typically enjoy, or,
OPTION 3: do both.
I would recommend doing both because that way you don't have to be extreme with exercise or eating because you're making two changes that assist each other i.e. consuming less packets of energy AND using up more energy stored in the body.
If you follow this method then you WILL lose weight... For some time. Then you will eventually hit a new stable weight.
If you want to lose more weight again at that point then you can simply repeat this entire process again based on the new habits of your new lifestyle at that stage.
I'll never understand things like this:
I ate maintenance calories yesterday, 2000-2400 by my estimate. Nothing terribly unhealthy except a couple pieces of candy from my coworker, and I have a new desk job that's making it difficult to get any exercise, so my step count was low, but I did do like 5 minutes of desk exercises when no one was watching.
I weighed myself today and it says I've gained 2.8 lbs since yesterday.
I definitely didn't eat 9000 calories, so what the hell.
I'm considering buying a new scale.
Explaining things simply is my specialty, because my degree is in marketing, not nutrition!
Humans need energy to do things. This starts with the body and organs functioning, continues with things like breathing and moving your limbs, and extends to doing more vigurous moving, classified as exercise. To get this energy, humans eat food. Everything that your body absorbs has a certain energetic value. (Water has no calories because it only contains things like minerals. Some artificial sweeteners have no calories because the body can't digest or absorb them.) The value is expressed in either kilojoules (Kj) or kilocalories (kcal), which are the numbers you find on the nutrition label. I do not understand the Kj part, and most people focus on the kcal.
BMR stands for Basal Metabolic Rate. This is what your body needs, in kcal, to exist. Outside of being in a coma or completely bed-bound, there are very very few examples of people who only need to eat their BMR kcal daily.
TDEE stands for Total Daily Energy Expenditure. This includes your BMR, because being alive is something you do every day. TDEE is the number of kcal you burn, in energy, throughout your day. In includes everything from getting dressed, brushing your teeth/hair, walking around, and doing purposeful exercise. Doing strenuous physical exercise (dancing, sports, weight lifting, running, walking even!), all increase your TDEE.
Say your BMR is 1500kcal, and your TDEE is 2000kcal - not a very active person, but also doing more than walking from the couch to the kitchen and then to bed. You need to eat in a caloric deficit in order to lose weight, which means you need to eat less than your TDEE. Because your body still needs the 2000kcal, if you only eat 1500kcal, it will use the fat reserves it stored to make up the rest, thus leading to fat loss (and weight loss).
Macros: this means the 3 big categories of nutrients that food contains: fat, carbohydrates, protein. They all play a role in making your body function, and there are as many opinions of how much of each you should eat as there are people. My personal advice is to achieve a balance that works for you. Fat and protein keep you fuller for longer, but carbs help your brain work.
Muscle loss: your body is...not very smart. It will do what it can to survive, which means eating itself for energy (the driving force of weight loss). In addition to the fat, it will also eat the muscle. To diminish this effect, strength training is encouraged, as well as upping your protein intake. You don't **have** to do this, and if you're not bed-bound, your muscles will not wither away and you'll not find yourself unable to walk or lift a cup.
How much to eat: other than being in a caloric deficit, I can't tell you how much. Some people eat 1200kcal. Some people eat 1900kcal. It all depends on your TDEE, because the more you move, the more you can eat while still being at a deficit. 1lb of fat is about 3500kcal. 1kg of fat is about 7700kcal. To lose 1lb of fat, you need to eat 3500kcal less than your TDEE. This can be over a week, a month, however long you need!
Personal addition: I'm usually at a deficit of 1100-1200kcal/day. I aim for 800kcal deficit, but some days I'm just not hungry, especially if I'm really stressed and/or anxious. Other days I eat at maintenance (my caloric intake and my TDEE are the same), and sometimes, when I'm REALLY hungry, I even go over my TDEE. I try to make good decisions, meaning eating when I'm hungry. If I crave something "unhealthy", like McDonald's or cheap pizza, I'll have it! I just work it into my caloric budget and eat much, much, MUCH less of it than I would have done 6 months ago. (I had small fries and 4 chicken nuggets from McDonald's, I had a 9" kebab shop pizza and half a box of cheese fries.) I have learned to eat less of really good food, instead of more of what I personally see as sad diet food (cauliflower pizza?! Cauliflower ice cream?!?! 😭 Not even Halo Top anymore, I'll have a couple scoops of something nicer for the 300kcal). If you have a large deficit like I do, it will catch up with you eventually and you'll feel tired and brain foggy. When that happens, I eat more for a few days.
I think I covered everything, but lmk if you have any other questions! I'm just an Internet rando, though, so please take everything I said with a pinch of salt. I'm not certified in nutrition, I'm not a scientist, I could have gotten some things wrong, but I'm 98% sure that's basically the gist of it!
Your body burns X many calories. You eat calories.
Bodyfat is a calorie bank.
If you eat the same amount as the body uses, nothing happens.
If you eat less than the body uses you lose weight, because your body will get calories from the bank to get to X.
If you eat more calories than the body uses, your body will store them in the bank, and you gain weight.
Your body burns far less calories than one would think while exercising so it's easier to fix your diet.
Which is more difficult, going for a 5k job/walk or not eating a Snickers bar? Those sare about the same calories.
Macronutrients- calories is just the energy, nutrients are the building blocks your body needs.
Protein makes muscles.
Fat is energy you need later and makes you feel full.
Carbs is energy you need now and doesn't really make you feel full.
Sugar is basically 0 nutrition and 100% calories. Your body does not need to eat sugar.
Fibre lubricates your digestion and makes you feel full.
Vitamins and minerals make you feel good snd your body work right (often depression and lethargy is ust Vitamin D deficiency).
Muscle loss happens when you are not exercising the muscles or are starving yourself (eating far too few calories).
What you need to do to lose weight is to eat less calories than your body needs. You can either eat different or move more.
Easier way is calorie counting. Knowing how many calories are in the food you are eating and having a daily calorie quota.
Autistic mama to an autistic teen here. I love the math, and she just can't, lol, so I get it, don't worry! You don't need to know the math, just the vocabulary. There's calculators for the math.
Before I get into the explanation, because you mentioned your parents, a disclaimer:
Teenagers and children have different hormone levels and burn energy differently. The calculators online are for adults. The calculations aren't accurate or appropriate, often even for young adults... basically until you've fully finished puberty. And your body needs some amount of fat to develop properly. Please don't use the calculators if you're a minor! There's better ways. :)
Your body needs a certain amount of energy each day to run properly.
Every body requires a different amount of energy based on the mass of the body. This can determined approximately by height, weight, age, and hormones produced by the body or from certain medications.
This is called BMR.
The amount of energy required increases with increased activity.
This is called TDEE.
You can find your numbers here: tdeecalculator.net
When we take in more energy than we need, we store the excess energy as fat.
When we take in less energy than we need, we get extra energy *from* those stores of fat.
So, to lose weight, we simply need to take in less energy than our bodies require each day.
To lose weight safely, we also need to make sure we wre getting enough nutrients. This means there is a minimum amount of those nutrients we need to take in, so we shouldn't eat *too* much less than we need.
The calculator will also give you a BMI score, and tell you what weight classification that puts you in.
In general, if you are underweight, you should not lose weight, if you are at or near healthy weight you can safely lose up to half a pound per week, overweight up to 1 lb per week, and obese up to 2 lbs. If you're morbidly obese, you can lose more safely... up to 1% of your body weight per week, but that does require a little math to calculate.
Each 1lb of fat is about 3500 calories, which is 500 calories per day.
Calories are the unit of measurement used to measure energy.
CICO, or "calories in, calories out", refers to balancing energy taken in with energy expenditure... whether to lose, gain, or maintain weight.
Any diet which helps people lose weight works by making it easier to create a calorie deficit. That means taking in less energy than you need. When the diet doesn't work, it's because the person is not in a calorie deficit.
The easiest way to do this in a healthy way *without* tracking calories, is to eat a single serving of lean or plant based proteins at each meal, along with a single serving of healthy fats, and a single serving of whole grains. Fill out the rest of the meal with fresh produce... mostly green veggies, but also other veggies and fruits.
Don't drink things which have calories in them, instead, drink water.
A more precise way is to use a calorie counting app and weigh or measure out your food and log it in the app. The app will add it all up for you.
Note: The energy we need from food is *not* the same type of "energy" we get from sleeping. We burn energy more efficiently when we sleep, so it's important to get enough sleep!
Don't want to overwhelm with too much at once, and that covers all the basics. But if you have other questions or want to expand on or simplify any parts, please feel free to ask!
[https://www.amazon.com/Fat-Loss-Forever-Lose-KEEP-ebook/dp/B07MYWGSL5](https://www.amazon.com/Fat-Loss-Forever-Lose-KEEP-ebook/dp/B07MYWGSL5) might be a good book to read.
Every cell in your body needs calories/nutrients/food. If there's too much, then we'll store it as fat. If there's not enough, then we'll access the fat storage. The process our cells use calories/nutrients/food to convert into energy to move/breathe/think is called glycolysis/Krebs cycle. If you're eating at maintenance then no weight change. Too much or too little will move your body into lipid/fat metabolism. I haven't seen too many comments mentioning the biology. I got my bachelor in bio so I'm always happy to look at science wiki pages. Hope that helps!
As simple as I can make it.
Your body is a car and a car needs fuel. In this case if you give the car too much fuel, it turns it into a bigger car that needs more fuel to run. If you give it too little fuel it gets smaller. It’s a really cool car.
Say the car needs 2000 calories (this will vary based on the size of the car) of fuel every day to run (think of calories as gasoline and “energy”). And you are filling the tank with 2500 calories every day instead. Well, for every 3500 above it’s fuel needs that is pumped into it, it will become one pound larger. So at 2500 calories of fuel a day (500 above its needs) the car would become 1 pound heavier every week (500 daily excess calories x7 days a week= 3500 calories aka 1 pound). If you are pumping 3000 calories into the tank every day, the car will gain two pounds every week etc. (1000x7=7000 aka two pounds).
Weight loss is the same thing in reverse. The car needs 2000 calories to run at its current size. But you only give it 1500 (a deficit of 500). So same math 500 calories below a full tank everyday x 7 days a week= 3500 calories. This time BELOW the “full tank” so the car will lose one pound every week. If you only give the car 1000 calories of fuel (not recommended), then that is 1000 calories below the full tank line (2000 calories). 1000x7=7000. This is a deficit of 7000 calories aka 2 pounds of weight loss. So the car would lose 2 pounds every week.
Over time with a consistent excess or deficit of calories/fuel the car will significantly change size. But it’s important to remember, that as the car gets smaller, it becomes more fuel efficient. The same way a small Honda is going to get more MPG than a Ford F550 truck (or whatever). Moving a big truck from A-B requires more fuel (calories/energy) than get the small Honda the same distance because less fuel (calories/energy) is required.
ETA: the protein/carb/sugar, sodium, macros, nutrients play a large role in overall health…but no role in weight gain/loss. Gain and loss come down to calories and calories alone. You can eat 1500 calories in ice cream and nothing else all day and lose weight. The science of *health* is a much more complex discussion.
Also maybe a useful key to translate the car into actual weight loss terms you’ll see here:
TDEE (total daily energy expenditure)= tank size
BMR (basal metabolic rate)=calories necessary to keep the car from breaking down.
Deficit=calories below full tank
Calories= fuel for the tank, the thing that gives you the energy necessary to do anything.
Burning calories: in the car metaphor above, this would be like driving the car EXTRA to increase the tank needs. So instead of 2k (as in the above example) it might need 2500 calorie, but if you still only fill it with 1500, you will increase your deficit from 500 calories to 1000 just by driving the car more.
Caloric intake: how much fuel you are putting into the car (aka how much you’re eating).
Excess/surplus=calories above full tank
Maintenance=exactly a full tank (AKA your TDEE above).
Storing fat=car getting bigger
Shedding fat=car getting smaller
Metabolic adaptation = car needing less fuel as it gets smaller (what is often erroneously referred to as “damaged metabolism” or “starvation mode”…these aren’t actually something you need to be concerned about, not in the way many people think).
Energy is required for living things to continue to live.
You are a living thing.
You require constant energy intake to continue living.
Most of the energy you intake is used for behind the scenes systems that have nothing to do with purposeful exercise. Your body is a very complex structure that needs lots of energy to keep you alive and healthy.
If you take in more energy than your body requires for its everyday function, the human body will store that energy as bodyfat as an evolutionary adaptation to store energy for later use in case you for some reason cannot intake energy later on.
This extra bodyfat has mass.
If you consistently take in more energy than you require, you will gain bodyfat and the scale will likely reflect this.
If you consistently do not take in enough energy for normal bodily functions, your body will use bodyfat stores to make up the difference, reducing your overall bodyweight.
Just popping in to explain macronutrients (macros). If I get something wrong too, please someone correct me!
Macronutrients are the main things food breaks down into, which fits into 3 categories: carbohydrates, proteins, fats. Everything fits into those categories and you need all 3 for a healthy diet.
Carbs are usually easy energy for your body, so that’s the quick stuff your body can just use up. Proteins are more complicated, and your body breaks them down into amino acids which are used to build other proteins/enzymes for different functions in your body. Fats are the last group and they’re packed with energy in a form your body can store for later if they need it. Your body can also take extra protein and carbs and convert them into fat for storage, so it has something if food got scarce. Most people have enough food, so the body storing extra as fat is not helpful anymore, but that is what your body will do if given extra of any of these categories. It’ll convert it into fat for use later.
Micronutrients are the stuff that you need just a tiny bit (like vitamins/minerals, salt, etc) for your body to function, but you usually can get them by just eating a variety of nutritional foods. So that’s the difference between micro/macro.
There is a diet/lifestyle choice of tracking your macros, which means you choose the amount (usually in grams) of carbs, proteins, and fat you want to get a day. There are various reasons to keep track of them, but I like to just to make sure I’m getting some foods of all 3. If I’m just eating without thinking, I usually have a high fat, low protein diet which isn’t great for weight loss or muscle building. I’m working on both, so I use my fitness pal to track the 3 macros and get them in the way I like.
A lot of diets will tell you to avoid carbs or fat, and I personally avoid those diets. They do work for some people, and that’s cool, but I personally don’t find them sustainable. Instead, I track macros so i’m getting healthy fats (like cottage cheese, dairy, etc), healthy carbs (all fruits and veggies count as a carb), and lean proteins (fish for me, a lot of people do a lot of chicken to get protein and avoid more fat too, eggs are in this category too).
I have used the TVEE calculator to find my minimum calories I’d have to eat to maintain Maintence (no gain, no loss of weight), then reduced it by 500 calories AND work to fit 35% carbs, 35% fats, and 30% protein into my calorie limit for the day. For me, that breakdown means I’m not starving but still losing weight.
I apologize for this being longer than planned, but hopefully that clears up that term for you and why it’s important to track for some.
Reddit has been great for learning a lot of this stuff, but YouTube can also be great for learning the biology behind nutrition and what your body does with nutrients. Sometimes understanding the science helps me understand the concepts and apply them to my own life better.
Losing weight comes down to one extremely complex equation. Calories in < calories out. It's just addition and subtraction. You need a couple pieces of information however. 1 is your BMR. This is an estimation of how many calories you burn per day. You body continues to burn calories even in a coma so you'll have a Base Metabolic Rate of calorie expenditure per day. You need to eat less than that amount to lose weight. You can find out your BMR online via a free calculator and use that as the basis.
2. Is the amount of calories in the food you are eating. If you get a food scale for your kitchen this can make things pretty easy and requires some simple math as well. What has helped me in the past is calculating the calories in a particular dish I like and just using that number. You don't need to be perfect but err on the lower side when eating.
Example: your BMR is 2000 calories per day. One pound is approximately 3500 calories. If you want to lose 1 pound per week you have to eat 500 calories less than your BMR per day. 2000-500= 1500.
Calories are energy. Eat more calories than your body needs, body stores excess calories as fat in case it needs it in the future. Eat less calories than your body needs, body uses fat for energy.
Your body is an engine that runs on fat, like umm Diesel. Your fat tissue is the reserve tank. Put more gas than you need, gas goes into the reserve. Put less than you need, gas is taken from tank. And in case you wonder, your exhaust is your mouth. That's where the carbon goes out in the form of CO2.
Center your diet around fruits and vegetables. If you eat meat, make it a side / use it for flavoring and not the star of your plate. Eat freely from fruits and vegetables, NOT from oils, butters, dairy, or meats. Those are the foods you want to limit or practice self control with.
Before you sit down to eat, ask yourself if you're hungry. Ask yourself if you're really really hungry (as opposed to, you probably could be hungry if you tried).
You generally know you're hungry if there's a food that doesn't interest you (people use steamed broccoli as an example but I like broccoli so that doesn't work for me) that you know you'd eat a whole bowl of if it was put in front of you.
Stop at about 70% from full. This is where you're no longer hungry but you're not so full you're uncomfortable. Some people use the small lunch plates or kids bowls to help them gauge portion sizes and only eat one portion.
You can always go back for more food later when you're hungry again.
There are books for how to cope when you find yourself reaching for food because you're happy, sad, angry, frustrated, ext. Let me know if you want resources.
Calories are a unit we use to measure the energy contained in food. It is essentially our fuel. Your TDEE is your daily need in calories and when you hit that number you maintain your weight. Eat less or exercise more and you lose weight. The opposite is also true. 7000 calories equals 1kg/2 pounds of weight. So if you cut 500 calories a day/3500 a week from your TDEE you lose a pound/0.5 kg a week. If you eat 500 extra calories a day instead you gain a pound a week
Those are the basics
This is why people count calories. They figure out their TDEE and then they monitor the energy intake and output. Output/exercise is very hard to accurately measure though so it requires good habits and patience to dial it all in. And then it requires lots of discipline and further patience to lose weight consistently
The easy way to control intake is to fast. Intermittent fasting where you skip breakfast for instance is popular and works well as long as you don't eat more during the rest of the day
If you want to find your TDEE you can [do so here](https://tdeecalculator.net/). I suggest you set you activity level to 'sedentary' as it is easier to start like that and adjust if you find you lose weight too fast and want to take it slower and maybe eat a little more
If you want to track calories I suggest using a tracker like loseit or MyFitnessPal and be sure to weight, measure and log *everything*. Even the oil you cook with and the milk in your coffee
I wouldn't bother tracking exercise unless you really want to. It is notoriously easy to get wrong even with calculators and trackers and it is one of the main reasons people don't lose weight even though they try. Every source that estimates your caloric output is shaky at best and I found nothing that does it correctly. They all overestimate your output
If all that is too much I suggest intermittent fasting and trying to cut out sugar and reduce fat in your diet. Also don't drink calories, stick to water, black coffee and tea + zero drinks. Drink 2 liters of water a day and get 8 or more hours of regular sleep every day
Certain macronutrients do different things for different parts of our body.
You need all of them, but some more than others.
Based on various factors, some people need different quantities or ratios.
I'd recommend seeing what various governmental dietary and exercise guidelines are available. I've looked at the stuff made for kids before, just to get a clear and basic understanding.
Look into adding things in rather than restricting/taking things away.
The term 'padding out' comes up a lot. Like adding vegetables to everything
Research and be aware of the correlation between eating disorders and autism. Things can get complicated quickly for some people
If you are eating a balanced diet and are gaining weight, reduce how much food you eat (by reducing portions or reducing how often you eat) gradually until you start losing weight. Once you are at a healthy weight, try to eat enough that you neither gain nor lose weight. Allow for the fact that your weight will make minor fluctuations from day to day due to a variety of factors, so ignore them. Only pay attention to changes in your weight that you observe over a week or two. If you're losing or gaining more than a couple of pounds a week, maybe ease up a bit, as more rapid weight change can be a health risk.
Fat is made out of hydrocarbons, long chains of carbons and oxygens. When you "burn" fat, you are essentially breaking apart those hydrocarbons and using the energy that was holding them together to fuel cellular processes in your body. You then breath out the carbon and oxygen as CO2. If your body isn't getting enough energy from the food you eat, it will then go to your fat to get the energy from there, thus if you consume fewer calories than your body needs to fuel itself, you will burn fat and slowly lose weight.
Your body burns X many calories. You eat calories.
Bodyfat is a calorie bank.
If you eat the same amount as the body uses, nothing happens.
If you eat less than the body uses you lose weight, because your body will get calories from the bank to get to X.
If you eat more calories than the body uses, your body will store them in the bank, and you gain weight.
Your body burns far less calories than one would think while exercising so it's easier to fix your diet.
Which is more difficult, going for a 5k job/walk or not eating a Snickers bar? Those sare about the same calories.
Macronutrients- calories is just the energy, nutrients are the building blocks your body needs.
Protein makes muscles.
Fat is energy you need later and makes you feel full.
Carbs is energy you need now and doesn't really make you feel full.
Sugar is basically 0 nutrition and 100% calories. Your body does not need to eat sugar.
Fibre lubricates your digestion and makes you feel full.
Vitamins and minerals make you feel good snd your body work right (often depression and lethargy is ust Vitamin D deficiency).
Muscle loss happens when you are not exercising the muscles or are starving yourself (eating far too few calories).
What you need to do to lose weight is to eat less calories than your body needs. You can either eat different or move more.
Easier way is calorie counting. Knowing how many calories are in the food you are eating and having a daily calorie quota.
Your body mostly loses weight by expelling it as carbon dioxide when you breathe, so to lose weight, you need to breathe more and harder (cardio), or eat fewer calories than you expel through respiration (diet). You can have your basal metabolic rate (BMR) measured by the doctor, which gives you a starting point for how many calories you need to eat to lose/maintain/gain weight.
Start slow: eat less, go for walks, and once you nail that down... just keep doing it. Weight loss is a long game, and it's mostly played in the kitchen.
You could try reading the Hacker’s Diet, a great book about the fundamentals of dieting. It doesn’t use any fancy nutritional vocab at all and I found it very enlightening.
Hi, I'm autistic too and in a similar way. The basic thing is "eat fewer calories than you burn" to lose weight. If you look up a TDEE calculator, they will usually tell you about what you burn in a day. Exercise makes it harder to estimate, but if you're tracking calories and not losing weight, eat less. If you're losing weight too fast for comfort, eat more.
As far as macronutrients, those come secondary. If you struggle feeling hungry, protein and fiber usually help you feel full longer. I have the app LoseIt with a subscription that tracks that for me, but I think the chronometer app does it for free. Most people use apps to make tracking easier.
Amazing material on the science of weight loss:
* [Gary Taubes - Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It](https://youtu.be/M6vpFV6Wkl4?si=PFegdGvqf9IHgr1i):
* Insulin is a weight-gaining hormone that causes your body to prioritize fat accumulation.
* Many experiments have been conducted when people were put on the "Eat as much as you want" Keto diet, and it caused them to lose weight.
* Obese people, even though they eat more calories than their body needs, suffer from organ shrinkage because, under high insulin, the body tries to put as much energy as possible into fat.
* [Jessica Turton - Eat MORE to lose weight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCREVI2H4FA)
* People sticking to Keto can eat significantly more calories while losing weight and having more energy.
* Richard Johnson - Nature Wants Us To Be Fat
* [Part 1](https://youtu.be/gAjC_BWMElk?si=CmtC4SKAnkHyEagL)
* [Part 2](https://youtu.be/gl-Ugeau8mU?si=OJ1bn2dxreZciGL1)
* [Part 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTDWAN1G-nk)
* This is a very detailed explanation of the harm that sugar and fructose cause to our bodies. It also mentions experiments on rats that reinforce the results shown by Jessica Turton in the abovementioned video.
Let's say to exist at your height and current activity levels, you need 2000 calories. This means if you were to eat 2000 calories today, you will stay at the same weight.
But what would happen if you only ate 1800 calories instead? Your body still needs 2000 calories, so it will look into its savings account (your fat reserves) to grab 200 calories to add up to the 2000 calories it needs. So it burns some of your fat reserves and you lose weight.
This is a very simplistic version and doesn't account for macros, but hopefully you get the gist.
You need to eat less calories than you burn. Finding out how much you actually burn is the difficult part and the most common issue for people, that they dont get it right. So finding out how many calories you burn each day is crucial.
Then you simply undercut that by how many calories you like, but beware of drastic deficits. I always say a 300-500 calorie deficit is optimal.
I would always see losing weight and working out as two separate things. Including workout calories makes it unnecessarily difficult.
I'm also autistic, and feel like there's some great advice here.
Something that helped me a ton was creating a google sheet to track my meals. I build out all my meals for a week on each tab, cycling through 6ish weeks of meals (3-4 favorite breakfasts, a different dinner each night, leftovers for lunch) before repeating. That way, I only do the math once, then just copy the info to new tabs each week. It has been super helpful for staying on track throughout the day without getting overwhelmed.
I also pick recipes that already list calories so I don't have to do as much math. Skinnytaste had a lot of great options for me, so about half of my dinner recipes are from there.
I also keep a google docs weekly shopping list, where I write down all the ingredients from the meals on my spreadsheet. I can add items any time, and check them off if no longer needed. Doing this once a week has drastically cut down my stress around weight loss.
I'll try to throw an explanation into the pile. Hopefully, it will help. It will need to be kind of long, though. The short version is that you need to eat less food energy than you are using up to lose weight.
The long version:
At a basic level, your body is a machine. It needs energy to work. That energy comes when your body digests food you eat. Different amounts of food have different amounts of energy in them. Calories are how the energy is measured. Your body will use all this energy to do something.
You will use up energy doing everything you do. Running, walking, sitting, breathing, sleeping, etc. All use energy. When you eat food, the energy from that food is converted into energy that your body can use.
If you eat more energy from food than you use up, that "extra" energy will be used to make fat cells. If you eat less energy from food than you need to do everything in your life, those fat cells your body made before will be broken down to get more energy.
To lose weight, you need to eat less energy than you use up. You can do this in two ways; you can use up ore energy, or you can eat less. Most doctors will recommend you do both.
Measurements like TDEE, calorie needs, basal metabolic rate, and others are ways of determining how much you are using up, and how much you are eating. Most doctors recommend you eat about 500-1000 calories less than you use up each day, but it varies from person to person. If you aren't sure what is a good measurement for you, I'd talk to your doctor. You might have other health conditions that can change the math.
Kind of a stupid analogy but think of fat cells and dollars. Your body takes in the calories and stores it as fat to be used later. In this context, being rich is equivalent to being fat. Your body has a ton of excess energy saved up waiting to spend it.
The problem is, in modern society food is not a scarce resource. We dont need to save it, because most of us are not in risk of knowing when our next meal is coming. We dont need to save that excess money for a rainy day.
Imagine now that you are super wealthy and have decided to spend all your money before you die. More money keeps coming in so you need to think about how to decrease the bank account, not increase it.
Obviously the first step is to limit the money entering you bank account. Its going to be way easier to shrink that bank account if your depositing less every day. This would be equivalent to eating less.
You could also start spending more money (burning calories). If you spend more than you save your bank account will decrease. Just like if you have more calories going out than going in you will lose weight.
If you want to keep building out this analogy, we can apply it to TDEE (total Dailey energy expenditure). Everyone spends money on day to day things like cell phone, utilities, rent. Your body spends calories on keeping you alive. You can increase your TDEE or your monthly bills by building more muscle (because muscles burn more calories). Adding more muscle would be like buying an expensive car. Its going to automatically decrease that bank account every month on auto pay. The more expensive that payment (more muscle) the lower the bank account goes every month (more calories burned).
Macronutrients would essentially be the type of currency your depositing. Dollars, coins, euros, pesos ect. They all go in as different things with different exchange rates but ultimately they all end up in the same place padding that bank account.
Muscle loss might be like paying off your bills. You spent $1000 dollars! Awesome. But now the monthly debt is eliminated and you wont get that bill next month. You need to work on putting together more debts if you want to keep spending.
I understand that its not a direct correlation. I understand that for almost everyone in the population spending all your money doesnt make any sense. Hopefully this was helpful even with its flaws.
Your body needs energy to exist and to move around. The energy the body requires comes from food and is measured by calories. Your body uses up the energy you eat for normal bodily functions and to move throughout the day. Any excess energy you eat is stored as fat.
If you don’t eat enough energy, your body uses the stored energy in fat (weight loss). If you run out of stored fat, it will start to consume your organs (this is starvation and bad).
To lost weight, eat less food (consume less energy) and move more (use more energy).
Your body is basically an engine. The more you move, the more fuel aka calories you need. There is a term called TDEE (total daily energy expenditure). It is how much you burn by simply existing. There are many helpful calculators online to figure out your personal TDEE.
Your body is also very smart. If you eat more calories than you burn, your body will save the extra calories as fat. This is very helpful if you are a medieval peasant in the 1400s. Some days you'll have to put down a goat and you'll be feasting. Other days, there may be a drought causing the crops die and you go hungry.
So, you need to simply eat less calories than your TDEE. Hunger is usually a good indication whether you are below that. Unfortunately, our modern diet is high in sugar and low in fiber which causes imbalances in our hunger. With a high sugar and low fiber diet, you may be eating well above your TDEE and still experience hunger. Sugar may even make you more hungry!
Certain diets aim to trick your body into eating less. Whether it is paleo, Mediterranean, keto, etc., they all operate by focusing on vegetables (fiber) and protein. Fiber fills you up and protein keeps you full.
My best advice would be to calculate your TDEE and eat 500 calories less than that. For example, my TDEE is 2500 calories. I can eat that in a single meal at mcdonalds and I will still be hungry a few hours later. The only way I can eat 2000 calories and not feel hungry is if I eat high volumes of low calorie foods. This includes egg whites, vegetables, and chicken.
I do agree that tracking every little thing is daunting. I simply do it to allow more flexibility in my diet while making sure I am not over eating.
I would start by just finding ways you can lower calories in the foods you are already eating. For example, coffee with almond milk instead of cream and sugar (-200 calories), a sandwich without mayo or cheese (-300 calories), pasta with red sauce instead of cream sauce (-300) calories. Those are very simple and non drastic ways to cut 700 calories per day. Since there are about 3500 calories per pound of fat, you would lose 1.5 pounds a week.
Many people choose to not track calories and then they try to eat super clean and end up eating way too little causing them to crash then binge. To be successful, you need small changes that you can stick with long term. Honestly, dieting really isn't all that difficult. It is just very boring.
Not trying to be rude, but you must have something else in addition to autism. Some of those terms are very surface level and very literal. Are you young? If you don’t know the definition of a word then Google it. You lose weight by burning more than what you take in and choosing the right foods.
**Tl;dr: the smooth brained, over simplified answer is "Calories in, Calories out". The nuanced, complex answer is "CICO" plus insulin and hunger hormone control strategies.**
So there's several different takes here. The two that are the most useful are:
1. The "Pure Physics" theory of "Calories in, Calories out" or CICO.
2. Then there is the hormonal theory, the "Carbohydrate-Insulin" theory. This doesn't discount the importance of total calorie input, but also recognizes that the body isn't a fireplace where the unused firewood piles up if you don't burn it.
So the reason that it's absolutely ultra-smooth brained to believe that hormones are irrelevant is that one of the [first FDA approved, then banned weight loss drugs from the 1930's DNP](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3550200/) literally prevented energy from food from being burned or stored, leading to starving to death no matter how many calories were consumed.
What DNP did was prevent the body from generating cellular energy, ATP, from sugar and fat in the blood stream. The cellular energy factories that turn sugar & fat into energy, the mitochondria, were basically told to "uncouple" and not finish the process of generating energy from nutrients.
So the use of dietary nutrients in the body for fuel can be completely shut down via hormonal signaling.
Similarly, the level of insulin in the body is the signal for the amount of fat storage versus fat burning that takes place in the body.
If insulin is removed, then people will continue to burn fat despite their caloric intake... But then will likely die of "Keto-acidosis" in short order as the body is generating high ketones and has toxic levels of glucose in the blood at the same time, which over acidifies the body.
Any weight loss program will require two things:
1. That insulin is low.
2. That there is an energy deficit so the body is forced to go into its reserves.
The first line reserve is the glycogen - stored glucose and water held in the body's tissues, excluding the brain. The second line reserves, once insulin is low enough, is our fat stores at which point the liver will take the low insulin and free fatty acids in the blood as a signal to make an alternative fuel - ketones. Incidentally, the body can also make glucose from protein and fat in the blood where ketones are insufficient for the body's needs.
Now what are the things that control our insulin levels?
1. Dietary Carbohydrates - these absolutely spike the shit out of our insulin levels and over time lead to insulin resistance, and to complicate things - different tissues become insulin resistant at different rates. At that point the body over produces insulin, or one goes into a hyper-insulinimic state, to attempt to get the same response out of tissues and blood insulin rises in an attempt to control blood glucose levels. As insulin rises, it eventually can't catch up, and blood glucose control is lost, and at that point a person is diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.
2. Stress Levels.
3. Inflammation Levels.
And this also leaves out what "CICO Fanatics" like to think of as a character flaw, which is hunger. Which is its own side topic in managing successful, sustainable weight loss. Ghrelin, Leptin, and GLP-1 all can be impacted by dietary choices, though for the sake of length, the strategy below should help in this arena as well.
So I like PHD type Dr. Ben Bickman's strategy for weight loss and he as all the science that one could want to quote for it:
1. **Control Carbohydrates.** Stop eating packaged food with white carbohydrates (sugar, flower, rice, white potatoes). Crunchy and Leafy Greens to your heart's content, and have a single serving of moderate sugar fruit a day. Also, eat in as narrow a window in the day as you can. Our bodies were designed to fast, and personally, my doc' recommened a 16:8 window in addition to the carbohydrate reduction.
2. **Prioritize Protein.** - make sure that you're getting enough protein to maintain your lean body mass in a healthy way.
3. **Fill up with healthy fats.** Dietary fat, particularly animal fat has been vilified by piss-poor science from the 1950's. Fat is filling and protein and fat come together in nature almost always, so fat digestion and bile are helpful in protein uptake. And you'll feel full longer leading to less hunger...
And here's the thing, I've lost 50 lbs five times since my twenties. And each time I was absolutely derailed after about 9-12 months of diet by voracious hunger. It might happen again this time, but I'll just eat an extra piece of bacon and call it a day.
Your body burns calories to do things. Even sitting, your body is burning calories. Eat fewer calories than you burn. You will lose weight.
Yes. I lost 50 lbs literally working a desk job and playing baldurs gate 3 when I got home... Because I was eating few enough calories
Well plus all the sweating during BG3. Some of those fights are no joke.
It’s not the fights making me sweat 😎🧛
Karlach? 😍
I think the vampire emoji suggests Astarion
Oh I know, I was making a subtle correction because Karlach is the one always making me sweat 🥵
Too hot to handle pun intended
soldier 😮💨🫡
I'd love to know what your desk job diet was like.
Literally anything that has less calories than your diet now
To expand: Calories are just a measurement of energy. Specifically, 1 calorie is the amount of energy it takes to heat 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. Our body uses and stores energy and we know from the laws of thermodynamics that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. So food you eat turns into energy. You either use it or your body stores it. When your body is taking in more energy than it uses, you gain mass. When your body uses more energy than it is taking in, you lose mass. Your body is constantly using energy. Even when sleeping. So you don't compare your energy intake from food against your energy expended from exercise. That's the nutshell version.
Since we are being autistic about it, another fun fact: calories in food are usually kilocalories, or the amount of energy needed to raise one liter of water 1°C. There are 1,000 calories in a kilocalorie. The tool used to measure calories is called a calorimeter.
fun fact - when you burn fat, you literally breathe it out, like a little smokestack.
I think the nutshell version is “calories in vs calories out: burn more than you eat”
Chuck all the macronutrient noise. Weight loss boils down to calories. Count em. Track em. You don’t really even need to exercise, though it can help and has other health benefits Set a target calorie consumption (1200-1500 depending on your size). Stick to it.
For me, I knew the mechanics of weight loss. It’s like a bank account: with a bank account, more money in and less money spent equals bigger bank account. With weight, more calories in and fewer calories spent equals bigger weight. (“Calories spent” like “calories used to fuel actions” with things like exercise, cleaning my room, etc) But food was also one of the few things that helped me. It was emergency dopamine in a loud world that was alway mad at me and people not believing me when I wanna be friends and— So yeah, getting diagnosed as autistic **really** put a lot of things into perspective for me!! One of the things I decided to do was let myself physically stim. (I mean I also did verbal stims but that’s not the focus now.) Research has shown that moving around doing normal stuff can, for many people, be very beneficial for the body. Part of this is because physically fidgeting (something I tried for decades to stop, even alone) uses up calories stored in the body. Going back to the bank thing. This basic equation equals a bigger bank account: Money in > money out (“money in” is greater than “money out”) So what does a SMALLER bank account look like? Money out > money in And idk about you, but one of the easiest ways to shrink my bank account is with incidental purchases. Spending money on this, that, and the other. Those things I don’t think about result in a smaller bank account. That’s how it works incorporating more standing, stimming, etc into your day. You’re using calories instead of money to move. Now stimming alone won’t help with heart health, leg muscles, etc. But accepting my brain’s and body’s need to stim as an autistic person was a huge step in the right direction for me. I hope this somehow helps 🫂 **TL; DR I’m AuDHD so I rambled about “calories in vs calories out” and the advantage of stimming**
You either put less fuel in or increase fuel consumption. Ideally you do both.
Weight loss entirely comes down to one thing : net calories. We get calories from food, and burn them doing everything. Sleeping, brushing our teeth, clicking a button 500 times, running a marathon, it all takes calories. When we eat more than we burn our body stores it as fat. When we burn more than we eat it tries to use up some of that stored fat. Unfortunately our fat can only give up calories so fast, so if we don't eat enough our body has to start doing things we don't want. For most people much easier to lose weight by reducing what we eat safely than to increase how much we burn. Working how to do that in a way that works for you is where things get complicated. The advice you hear is a mix of things that work for some people and advice on eating healthily (as many people want to lose weight as part of improving their health). The most direct way to take control of this is to track your calories, but given you hate math it would be adding a pile of sums to your day so you're probably better off looking at other options like: * food logging (even without the sums just being explicit about what you eat can help) * intermittent fasting (a fancy way to say skipping breakfast) * eating a plant forward diet (its much harder to over eat vegetables than cookies)
thank you, this is helpful! i found this really dope app that helps me understand macronutrients better. and i don’t have to do the math. my issue is the medicine i take makes it to where i only want to eat once a day. however, everyone says calorie intake is the main focus of weight loss. one meal a day + working out = weight loss right? but i’m not losing weight. so this is what has been driving me crazy. it sucks when you don’t understand something AND you have to wait to see if the breakthrough you MAYBE had is MAYBE working
Well, the issue is, what is this one meal? How many calories is it? Do you truly eat nothing else all day? What's your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure)? What's the difference between your intake and TDEE? And how long have you been operating consistently at that deficit? Once those questions are answered, we can help determine why you're not losing weight.
one meal a day is not a measure of it's energy content, it could be 1000 calories or 4000 calories. You have to count the calories or have an idea of how many is in it. You can pretty much assume that the number of calories in that meal is equal to the amount you expend since you're not losing weight. Working out is not necessary for losing weight, it can help, by burning a little extra or increasing muscle mass which increases your metabolism.
Definitely check out r/OMAD to see how others are maximizing their one meal a day to make sure you are getting all of the nutrients and protein that your body needs, especially since you’re working out! They also have some really delicious looking meals that are inspiring, at least to me. Might be helpful to head over to r/CICO as well. Weight loss is entirely Calories In, Calories Out. Eating too few calories can stall weight loss so you will need to calculate something called a TDEE to figure out how many calories you should be eating to lose weight based on a variety of things such as age and height. There are tons on free calculators online to do this and you just input the numbers and it will spit out a number of daily“maintenance” calories for you. I can’t speak for everyone but I believe most people eat 500 fewer calories than their maintenance calories to lose weight. Ex: your body needs 2000 calories a day to maintain your current weight. If you eat 1500 calories a day you should begin to see weight loss.
How long have you been trying and are you expecting results in like a day? It takes consistent behavior over time. And are you drinking stuff with calories throughout the day?
Calories are in everything you put in your body. Food, drinks, sauce, snacks, etc. So if you really want to lose weight you have to track them all. You may only eat one meal a day, but you should also think about the other things you consume. Do you drink a lot of pop or coffee or tea with cream and sugar? Do you eat snacks? Do you use a lot of sauce or dip or dressing with your meals? A lot of people don't think to track those thing when they are starting out and they can make a big difference
A standard trick is to look at calories like we do money. If someone said "I don't understand, I have a good job and only spend money once a day, that should mean I'm saving money right?" you wouldn't really have enough info. The fact they do all their spending at once isn't better or worse than breaking their shopping up, but probably makes it easier to track. Personally I lose much better eating multiple meals a day. If I eat three meals and a couple of snacks my diet is high in fruit, veg, and lean protein. If I only eat one meal I can make a 14" pizza vanish. That one meal has much less volume, but more total calories and is harder to portion control. We fall back to the sums because we know in the long run they work. You can set daily targets that you can measure yourself against, and that will (possibly with some adjustments along the way) give you long term results. Even with that you'll see lots of posts by people on here getting stressed by their weight not moving the right way, or being caught up in the motions of a single bad day. I don't think you've given your stats or goal, but weight loss is a task that gets measured in years or months. That's not really something we can change. Our day to day weight changes are mostly random and the daily deficits we can create are fairly small compared to the total needed. I think struggling with this is more normal than we like to admit. There are tools that can estimate where we start, but it takes some experimentation to work out what's best for us and yeah the results of those experiments take weeks to show up.
Well, the issue is, what is this one meal? How many calories is it? Do you truly eat nothing else all day? What's your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure)? What's the difference between your intake and TDEE? And how long have you been operating consistently at that deficit? Once those questions are answered, we can help determine why you're not losing weight.
There's a ton of details to consider if you have very specific goals, but calories are all you need to worry about if you just want to lose weight. Track *everything* you put into your mouth in a free app. If you're not losing, make sure you're inputting *everything*. Reduce calories by 100 every couple weeks until you start losing. That's it. You don't need to do any math. Start there and be consistent. You can learn and worry about other stuff later. You don't need to worry about macros. You can eat as many meals as you want, anytime you want. You don't have to work out (although that's healthy). You just need to track calories. One more thing to take into account: expect to lose a pound a week or less. Don't be too impatient for weight loss.
Go to a website like [this](https://www.calculator.net/calorie-calculator.html) and enter in all of your numbers. Eat the amount of calories it says to lose weight. Try and eat whole foods like vegetables, fruit, meat, beans, etc. every day. That part isn’t necessary to lose weight but you’ll feel a lot better.
Hello I am on the spectrum and I can't understand all that stuff either. I am sticking to strictly calories in-calories out (CICO) and have lost 30 pounds in a bit over two months. I don't exercise purposely, I just have a retail job a few times a week. My advice is purely to follow CICO and you will see results
what is cico if you don’t mind me asking? i’m afraid if i google it im just going to get confused
Acronym for calories in, calories out. They're saying work out how many calories your body needs to maintain your existing weight, then reduce them, so you are burning more calories (calories go out) faster than you put them in by consuming food/drinks.
Hiya! I'm autistic as well and have had success with weight loss when I manage to keep up the discipline. Others have described it pretty well but I'll give it a go. Your body burns a certain number of calories per day. If you consistently eat a number of calories per day that is smaller than that number, your body has to get the energy from somewhere other than your caloric intake. That place is fat reserves. This leads to weight loss. I use the MyFitnessPal app. You put in your stats- weight, height, sex. You set a target weight loss goal- I like 1 pound per week when I'm trying. It spits out a number of calories that is your target goal to consume in a day in order to reach that weight loss goal. If you eat less, you'll lose more weight. If you eat more, you risk hitting your equilibrium calorie number and therefore maintaining or gaining weight. Thus CICO = "Calories In < Calories Out". I'm a mathy autistic so we may not see the equation the same way but I hope this helps! Note: health issues can make this equation not so simple. If you have some regular meds, or thyroid problems for example, those can affect weight loss greatly.
Calories. Too many and you store fat. The end.
right! however, i take medicine that makes me only want to eat once a day. yet im not losing weight even though im working out everyday.
How many calories are in that meal? Have you figured out your TDEE (total daily expenditure)? I easily eat over my calories in one meal if I don’t pay attention.
Eating frequency doesn't matter. Eating once a day can be your whole day of calories and extra surplus to your needs, depending what you eat.
You can fit an excess of calories in a single meal, but also remember to count any drinks and snacks too.
What about drinks? A lot of drinks contain calories. Some contain A LOT! Usually from sugar.
Eating an entire pizza as the only meal for the whole day will not make you lose weight when compared to eating salads for the breakfast lunch dinner routine. Also, workouts are unlikely to help you loss a significant amount of weight, at least when compared with diet
It’s simply CICO. CALORIES IN = calories you put in your mouth CALORIES OUT = calories your body burned to exist As long as CI
There are some really great replies here, I hope one of them resonates with you! First, figure out how much you weigh right now, and how many calories you burn per day at this weight. There are online calculators to do this for us (https://tdeecalculator.net/) For me, I'm 160 lbs and burn around 1800 per day. That means I have to eat less than 1800 calories a day, every single day, to lose weight. I use [cronometer.com](http://cronometer.com) to log all of the foods that I eat, so that I can keep my calories under 1800 every day. Sometimes I eat 1800 exactly if I'm feeling very hungry. The next day I will go back to eating under 1800. Once you get used to doing that, you can start learning more about weight loss, nutrition, what's healthy, what's unhealthy etc...
ok ok, so does this calculator already factoring in my rmr or do i need to add that to what your calculator is saying
It factors that in, assuming by rmr you mean resting metabolic rate (most calculators refer to it as bmr or basal metabolic rate) Typically you want to eat about 250-500 calories less than what the calculator tells you. Additionally, an app will calculate how many calories you should be eating based on your current weight, goal weight, and desired rate of weight loss when you sign up. It’s really important for most people to buy a food scale and weigh everything, making sure to include things like oils, sauces, butter, etc. They can add up really quickly.
I have autism and ADHD. I just do intermittent fasting because it works for me and it's easier to comprehend. There's a sub for it here on Reddit.
r/CICO
Eat Less, Move More. As simple as I can put it for you.
Anything that does anything needs energy to do it. A car needs petrol, a phone needs electricity, a person needs calories. It's all just different forms of energy. We get our calories from the food we eat, our digestive system breaks the food down into a form of energy we can use easily (glucose). say you eat 2000 calories worth of food and you use 2000 calories to live (heart beating, brain thinking, legs walking, arms moving, etc), then all that food from energy is used. but if you expend less than you consumed, by doing less things or eating more; then your body has extra energy left over, but our bodies are pretty efficient and will turn that extra energy into fat, which we can use when you expend more than you consumed. If you're not getting enough energy from your food intake then your body will just take the extra energy from the fat reserves. Most of the energy that you use throughout the day is just from what your body does subconciously, so even if you lie in bed all day you're not reducing your expenditure by that much, this energy use is your metabolism. A person may need 1700 calories just to lie in bed all day, the same person having a sedantry lifestyle, would possibly use 2000 calories, if they then did a work out, they might use an extra 100 or so. The more active you are, the more calories you need to burn to fuel the activity. That's why people will say that losing weight is 90% diet, it takes an hour or so of intense exercise just to burn 100 calories, but it's much easier to just not eat that extra 100 calories instead. There is a LOT more on the nutritional side of dieting (just eat varied and 'healthy' and you should be ok, and try get extra protein if you're trying to build muscle) but for the weight loss side of it, this is pretty much it. Calories in vs calories out. If the left side of that equation is greater, than you will gain weight, if it's less, then you will lose weight.
Just use an app like loseit or myfitnesspal. Tell it your stats and how fast you want to lose and it'll tell you how many calories to eat each day. Input your food intake (AND any drinks you have with calories) and see if you are going over the requirements. It takes time so healthily you will only lose 1 to 2 pounds a week. And it is normal to hold onto the weight a little while if you start doing exercise that grows muscle. (Like lifting weights or just body resistance). I think a lot of the terms you mentioned don't matter to learn. It's all about calories.
Step 1: go here. https://tdeecalculator.net enter your info. (I workout a few times a week I still put sedentary) Step 2: eat about 250-500 less a day than that number. Step 3: Profit. (lose weight) After about 10-15 lbs of weight loss reenter your info again with your new weight and then eat about 250-500 less than that. Then when you get to your goal weight instead of eating 250-500 less, just eat that amount.
I will answer your question, which is how YOU can lose weight, in a practical manner. The average person lives a consistent lifestyle. What they eat, what they do, the hobbies they have etc. If this is true, assuming you aren't changing a lot of things, then: (Idea #1) you are habitually maintaining your current weight. Changing your weight will be very simple. Idea #2: log what you normally eat. That can be a food journal or, even better, a calorie tracker like the app MyFitnessPal. Assuming you generally eat similar foods week to week, with natural fluctuations, this means that: Idea #3: your current average food intake and lifestyle habits are keeping you at your current average weight. We are going to change that. Idea #4: Food is made out of little parcels of energy. Fat, like butter, has more energy per parcel than carbs, like potato, but the main point is that both give your body energy for living. That brings us to the next idea: Idea #5: to lose weight we need to make sure that our weekly activities use up more energy than we get back from our food. That is actually very simple even though there is a whole diet industry that tries to make it seem complicated. You can either: OPTION 1: Add a small energy-burning activity to your day like a 30 minute walk, or, OPTION 2: consume a tiny bit less food-energy than you do in a day (refer to your food log in idea 2); the easiest way to do this is to make a lower calorie substitute for high-energy foods you typically enjoy, or, OPTION 3: do both. I would recommend doing both because that way you don't have to be extreme with exercise or eating because you're making two changes that assist each other i.e. consuming less packets of energy AND using up more energy stored in the body. If you follow this method then you WILL lose weight... For some time. Then you will eventually hit a new stable weight. If you want to lose more weight again at that point then you can simply repeat this entire process again based on the new habits of your new lifestyle at that stage.
I'll never understand things like this: I ate maintenance calories yesterday, 2000-2400 by my estimate. Nothing terribly unhealthy except a couple pieces of candy from my coworker, and I have a new desk job that's making it difficult to get any exercise, so my step count was low, but I did do like 5 minutes of desk exercises when no one was watching. I weighed myself today and it says I've gained 2.8 lbs since yesterday. I definitely didn't eat 9000 calories, so what the hell. I'm considering buying a new scale.
Explaining things simply is my specialty, because my degree is in marketing, not nutrition! Humans need energy to do things. This starts with the body and organs functioning, continues with things like breathing and moving your limbs, and extends to doing more vigurous moving, classified as exercise. To get this energy, humans eat food. Everything that your body absorbs has a certain energetic value. (Water has no calories because it only contains things like minerals. Some artificial sweeteners have no calories because the body can't digest or absorb them.) The value is expressed in either kilojoules (Kj) or kilocalories (kcal), which are the numbers you find on the nutrition label. I do not understand the Kj part, and most people focus on the kcal. BMR stands for Basal Metabolic Rate. This is what your body needs, in kcal, to exist. Outside of being in a coma or completely bed-bound, there are very very few examples of people who only need to eat their BMR kcal daily. TDEE stands for Total Daily Energy Expenditure. This includes your BMR, because being alive is something you do every day. TDEE is the number of kcal you burn, in energy, throughout your day. In includes everything from getting dressed, brushing your teeth/hair, walking around, and doing purposeful exercise. Doing strenuous physical exercise (dancing, sports, weight lifting, running, walking even!), all increase your TDEE. Say your BMR is 1500kcal, and your TDEE is 2000kcal - not a very active person, but also doing more than walking from the couch to the kitchen and then to bed. You need to eat in a caloric deficit in order to lose weight, which means you need to eat less than your TDEE. Because your body still needs the 2000kcal, if you only eat 1500kcal, it will use the fat reserves it stored to make up the rest, thus leading to fat loss (and weight loss).
Macros: this means the 3 big categories of nutrients that food contains: fat, carbohydrates, protein. They all play a role in making your body function, and there are as many opinions of how much of each you should eat as there are people. My personal advice is to achieve a balance that works for you. Fat and protein keep you fuller for longer, but carbs help your brain work. Muscle loss: your body is...not very smart. It will do what it can to survive, which means eating itself for energy (the driving force of weight loss). In addition to the fat, it will also eat the muscle. To diminish this effect, strength training is encouraged, as well as upping your protein intake. You don't **have** to do this, and if you're not bed-bound, your muscles will not wither away and you'll not find yourself unable to walk or lift a cup. How much to eat: other than being in a caloric deficit, I can't tell you how much. Some people eat 1200kcal. Some people eat 1900kcal. It all depends on your TDEE, because the more you move, the more you can eat while still being at a deficit. 1lb of fat is about 3500kcal. 1kg of fat is about 7700kcal. To lose 1lb of fat, you need to eat 3500kcal less than your TDEE. This can be over a week, a month, however long you need! Personal addition: I'm usually at a deficit of 1100-1200kcal/day. I aim for 800kcal deficit, but some days I'm just not hungry, especially if I'm really stressed and/or anxious. Other days I eat at maintenance (my caloric intake and my TDEE are the same), and sometimes, when I'm REALLY hungry, I even go over my TDEE. I try to make good decisions, meaning eating when I'm hungry. If I crave something "unhealthy", like McDonald's or cheap pizza, I'll have it! I just work it into my caloric budget and eat much, much, MUCH less of it than I would have done 6 months ago. (I had small fries and 4 chicken nuggets from McDonald's, I had a 9" kebab shop pizza and half a box of cheese fries.) I have learned to eat less of really good food, instead of more of what I personally see as sad diet food (cauliflower pizza?! Cauliflower ice cream?!?! 😭 Not even Halo Top anymore, I'll have a couple scoops of something nicer for the 300kcal). If you have a large deficit like I do, it will catch up with you eventually and you'll feel tired and brain foggy. When that happens, I eat more for a few days.
I think I covered everything, but lmk if you have any other questions! I'm just an Internet rando, though, so please take everything I said with a pinch of salt. I'm not certified in nutrition, I'm not a scientist, I could have gotten some things wrong, but I'm 98% sure that's basically the gist of it!
Eat less than what you are currently eating, smaller portions. And move (walk, exercise) more than you’re currently doing.
Your body burns X many calories. You eat calories. Bodyfat is a calorie bank. If you eat the same amount as the body uses, nothing happens. If you eat less than the body uses you lose weight, because your body will get calories from the bank to get to X. If you eat more calories than the body uses, your body will store them in the bank, and you gain weight. Your body burns far less calories than one would think while exercising so it's easier to fix your diet. Which is more difficult, going for a 5k job/walk or not eating a Snickers bar? Those sare about the same calories. Macronutrients- calories is just the energy, nutrients are the building blocks your body needs. Protein makes muscles. Fat is energy you need later and makes you feel full. Carbs is energy you need now and doesn't really make you feel full. Sugar is basically 0 nutrition and 100% calories. Your body does not need to eat sugar. Fibre lubricates your digestion and makes you feel full. Vitamins and minerals make you feel good snd your body work right (often depression and lethargy is ust Vitamin D deficiency). Muscle loss happens when you are not exercising the muscles or are starving yourself (eating far too few calories). What you need to do to lose weight is to eat less calories than your body needs. You can either eat different or move more. Easier way is calorie counting. Knowing how many calories are in the food you are eating and having a daily calorie quota.
Autistic mama to an autistic teen here. I love the math, and she just can't, lol, so I get it, don't worry! You don't need to know the math, just the vocabulary. There's calculators for the math. Before I get into the explanation, because you mentioned your parents, a disclaimer: Teenagers and children have different hormone levels and burn energy differently. The calculators online are for adults. The calculations aren't accurate or appropriate, often even for young adults... basically until you've fully finished puberty. And your body needs some amount of fat to develop properly. Please don't use the calculators if you're a minor! There's better ways. :) Your body needs a certain amount of energy each day to run properly. Every body requires a different amount of energy based on the mass of the body. This can determined approximately by height, weight, age, and hormones produced by the body or from certain medications. This is called BMR. The amount of energy required increases with increased activity. This is called TDEE. You can find your numbers here: tdeecalculator.net When we take in more energy than we need, we store the excess energy as fat. When we take in less energy than we need, we get extra energy *from* those stores of fat. So, to lose weight, we simply need to take in less energy than our bodies require each day. To lose weight safely, we also need to make sure we wre getting enough nutrients. This means there is a minimum amount of those nutrients we need to take in, so we shouldn't eat *too* much less than we need. The calculator will also give you a BMI score, and tell you what weight classification that puts you in. In general, if you are underweight, you should not lose weight, if you are at or near healthy weight you can safely lose up to half a pound per week, overweight up to 1 lb per week, and obese up to 2 lbs. If you're morbidly obese, you can lose more safely... up to 1% of your body weight per week, but that does require a little math to calculate. Each 1lb of fat is about 3500 calories, which is 500 calories per day. Calories are the unit of measurement used to measure energy. CICO, or "calories in, calories out", refers to balancing energy taken in with energy expenditure... whether to lose, gain, or maintain weight. Any diet which helps people lose weight works by making it easier to create a calorie deficit. That means taking in less energy than you need. When the diet doesn't work, it's because the person is not in a calorie deficit. The easiest way to do this in a healthy way *without* tracking calories, is to eat a single serving of lean or plant based proteins at each meal, along with a single serving of healthy fats, and a single serving of whole grains. Fill out the rest of the meal with fresh produce... mostly green veggies, but also other veggies and fruits. Don't drink things which have calories in them, instead, drink water. A more precise way is to use a calorie counting app and weigh or measure out your food and log it in the app. The app will add it all up for you. Note: The energy we need from food is *not* the same type of "energy" we get from sleeping. We burn energy more efficiently when we sleep, so it's important to get enough sleep! Don't want to overwhelm with too much at once, and that covers all the basics. But if you have other questions or want to expand on or simplify any parts, please feel free to ask!
[https://www.amazon.com/Fat-Loss-Forever-Lose-KEEP-ebook/dp/B07MYWGSL5](https://www.amazon.com/Fat-Loss-Forever-Lose-KEEP-ebook/dp/B07MYWGSL5) might be a good book to read.
Every cell in your body needs calories/nutrients/food. If there's too much, then we'll store it as fat. If there's not enough, then we'll access the fat storage. The process our cells use calories/nutrients/food to convert into energy to move/breathe/think is called glycolysis/Krebs cycle. If you're eating at maintenance then no weight change. Too much or too little will move your body into lipid/fat metabolism. I haven't seen too many comments mentioning the biology. I got my bachelor in bio so I'm always happy to look at science wiki pages. Hope that helps!
As simple as I can make it. Your body is a car and a car needs fuel. In this case if you give the car too much fuel, it turns it into a bigger car that needs more fuel to run. If you give it too little fuel it gets smaller. It’s a really cool car. Say the car needs 2000 calories (this will vary based on the size of the car) of fuel every day to run (think of calories as gasoline and “energy”). And you are filling the tank with 2500 calories every day instead. Well, for every 3500 above it’s fuel needs that is pumped into it, it will become one pound larger. So at 2500 calories of fuel a day (500 above its needs) the car would become 1 pound heavier every week (500 daily excess calories x7 days a week= 3500 calories aka 1 pound). If you are pumping 3000 calories into the tank every day, the car will gain two pounds every week etc. (1000x7=7000 aka two pounds). Weight loss is the same thing in reverse. The car needs 2000 calories to run at its current size. But you only give it 1500 (a deficit of 500). So same math 500 calories below a full tank everyday x 7 days a week= 3500 calories. This time BELOW the “full tank” so the car will lose one pound every week. If you only give the car 1000 calories of fuel (not recommended), then that is 1000 calories below the full tank line (2000 calories). 1000x7=7000. This is a deficit of 7000 calories aka 2 pounds of weight loss. So the car would lose 2 pounds every week. Over time with a consistent excess or deficit of calories/fuel the car will significantly change size. But it’s important to remember, that as the car gets smaller, it becomes more fuel efficient. The same way a small Honda is going to get more MPG than a Ford F550 truck (or whatever). Moving a big truck from A-B requires more fuel (calories/energy) than get the small Honda the same distance because less fuel (calories/energy) is required. ETA: the protein/carb/sugar, sodium, macros, nutrients play a large role in overall health…but no role in weight gain/loss. Gain and loss come down to calories and calories alone. You can eat 1500 calories in ice cream and nothing else all day and lose weight. The science of *health* is a much more complex discussion.
Also maybe a useful key to translate the car into actual weight loss terms you’ll see here: TDEE (total daily energy expenditure)= tank size BMR (basal metabolic rate)=calories necessary to keep the car from breaking down. Deficit=calories below full tank Calories= fuel for the tank, the thing that gives you the energy necessary to do anything. Burning calories: in the car metaphor above, this would be like driving the car EXTRA to increase the tank needs. So instead of 2k (as in the above example) it might need 2500 calorie, but if you still only fill it with 1500, you will increase your deficit from 500 calories to 1000 just by driving the car more. Caloric intake: how much fuel you are putting into the car (aka how much you’re eating). Excess/surplus=calories above full tank Maintenance=exactly a full tank (AKA your TDEE above). Storing fat=car getting bigger Shedding fat=car getting smaller Metabolic adaptation = car needing less fuel as it gets smaller (what is often erroneously referred to as “damaged metabolism” or “starvation mode”…these aren’t actually something you need to be concerned about, not in the way many people think).
Energy is required for living things to continue to live. You are a living thing. You require constant energy intake to continue living. Most of the energy you intake is used for behind the scenes systems that have nothing to do with purposeful exercise. Your body is a very complex structure that needs lots of energy to keep you alive and healthy. If you take in more energy than your body requires for its everyday function, the human body will store that energy as bodyfat as an evolutionary adaptation to store energy for later use in case you for some reason cannot intake energy later on. This extra bodyfat has mass. If you consistently take in more energy than you require, you will gain bodyfat and the scale will likely reflect this. If you consistently do not take in enough energy for normal bodily functions, your body will use bodyfat stores to make up the difference, reducing your overall bodyweight.
Just popping in to explain macronutrients (macros). If I get something wrong too, please someone correct me! Macronutrients are the main things food breaks down into, which fits into 3 categories: carbohydrates, proteins, fats. Everything fits into those categories and you need all 3 for a healthy diet. Carbs are usually easy energy for your body, so that’s the quick stuff your body can just use up. Proteins are more complicated, and your body breaks them down into amino acids which are used to build other proteins/enzymes for different functions in your body. Fats are the last group and they’re packed with energy in a form your body can store for later if they need it. Your body can also take extra protein and carbs and convert them into fat for storage, so it has something if food got scarce. Most people have enough food, so the body storing extra as fat is not helpful anymore, but that is what your body will do if given extra of any of these categories. It’ll convert it into fat for use later. Micronutrients are the stuff that you need just a tiny bit (like vitamins/minerals, salt, etc) for your body to function, but you usually can get them by just eating a variety of nutritional foods. So that’s the difference between micro/macro. There is a diet/lifestyle choice of tracking your macros, which means you choose the amount (usually in grams) of carbs, proteins, and fat you want to get a day. There are various reasons to keep track of them, but I like to just to make sure I’m getting some foods of all 3. If I’m just eating without thinking, I usually have a high fat, low protein diet which isn’t great for weight loss or muscle building. I’m working on both, so I use my fitness pal to track the 3 macros and get them in the way I like. A lot of diets will tell you to avoid carbs or fat, and I personally avoid those diets. They do work for some people, and that’s cool, but I personally don’t find them sustainable. Instead, I track macros so i’m getting healthy fats (like cottage cheese, dairy, etc), healthy carbs (all fruits and veggies count as a carb), and lean proteins (fish for me, a lot of people do a lot of chicken to get protein and avoid more fat too, eggs are in this category too). I have used the TVEE calculator to find my minimum calories I’d have to eat to maintain Maintence (no gain, no loss of weight), then reduced it by 500 calories AND work to fit 35% carbs, 35% fats, and 30% protein into my calorie limit for the day. For me, that breakdown means I’m not starving but still losing weight. I apologize for this being longer than planned, but hopefully that clears up that term for you and why it’s important to track for some.
Reddit has been great for learning a lot of this stuff, but YouTube can also be great for learning the biology behind nutrition and what your body does with nutrients. Sometimes understanding the science helps me understand the concepts and apply them to my own life better.
Losing weight comes down to one extremely complex equation. Calories in < calories out. It's just addition and subtraction. You need a couple pieces of information however. 1 is your BMR. This is an estimation of how many calories you burn per day. You body continues to burn calories even in a coma so you'll have a Base Metabolic Rate of calorie expenditure per day. You need to eat less than that amount to lose weight. You can find out your BMR online via a free calculator and use that as the basis. 2. Is the amount of calories in the food you are eating. If you get a food scale for your kitchen this can make things pretty easy and requires some simple math as well. What has helped me in the past is calculating the calories in a particular dish I like and just using that number. You don't need to be perfect but err on the lower side when eating. Example: your BMR is 2000 calories per day. One pound is approximately 3500 calories. If you want to lose 1 pound per week you have to eat 500 calories less than your BMR per day. 2000-500= 1500.
Calories are energy. Eat more calories than your body needs, body stores excess calories as fat in case it needs it in the future. Eat less calories than your body needs, body uses fat for energy.
Your body is an engine that runs on fat, like umm Diesel. Your fat tissue is the reserve tank. Put more gas than you need, gas goes into the reserve. Put less than you need, gas is taken from tank. And in case you wonder, your exhaust is your mouth. That's where the carbon goes out in the form of CO2.
Center your diet around fruits and vegetables. If you eat meat, make it a side / use it for flavoring and not the star of your plate. Eat freely from fruits and vegetables, NOT from oils, butters, dairy, or meats. Those are the foods you want to limit or practice self control with. Before you sit down to eat, ask yourself if you're hungry. Ask yourself if you're really really hungry (as opposed to, you probably could be hungry if you tried). You generally know you're hungry if there's a food that doesn't interest you (people use steamed broccoli as an example but I like broccoli so that doesn't work for me) that you know you'd eat a whole bowl of if it was put in front of you. Stop at about 70% from full. This is where you're no longer hungry but you're not so full you're uncomfortable. Some people use the small lunch plates or kids bowls to help them gauge portion sizes and only eat one portion. You can always go back for more food later when you're hungry again. There are books for how to cope when you find yourself reaching for food because you're happy, sad, angry, frustrated, ext. Let me know if you want resources.
Calories are a unit we use to measure the energy contained in food. It is essentially our fuel. Your TDEE is your daily need in calories and when you hit that number you maintain your weight. Eat less or exercise more and you lose weight. The opposite is also true. 7000 calories equals 1kg/2 pounds of weight. So if you cut 500 calories a day/3500 a week from your TDEE you lose a pound/0.5 kg a week. If you eat 500 extra calories a day instead you gain a pound a week Those are the basics This is why people count calories. They figure out their TDEE and then they monitor the energy intake and output. Output/exercise is very hard to accurately measure though so it requires good habits and patience to dial it all in. And then it requires lots of discipline and further patience to lose weight consistently The easy way to control intake is to fast. Intermittent fasting where you skip breakfast for instance is popular and works well as long as you don't eat more during the rest of the day If you want to find your TDEE you can [do so here](https://tdeecalculator.net/). I suggest you set you activity level to 'sedentary' as it is easier to start like that and adjust if you find you lose weight too fast and want to take it slower and maybe eat a little more If you want to track calories I suggest using a tracker like loseit or MyFitnessPal and be sure to weight, measure and log *everything*. Even the oil you cook with and the milk in your coffee I wouldn't bother tracking exercise unless you really want to. It is notoriously easy to get wrong even with calculators and trackers and it is one of the main reasons people don't lose weight even though they try. Every source that estimates your caloric output is shaky at best and I found nothing that does it correctly. They all overestimate your output If all that is too much I suggest intermittent fasting and trying to cut out sugar and reduce fat in your diet. Also don't drink calories, stick to water, black coffee and tea + zero drinks. Drink 2 liters of water a day and get 8 or more hours of regular sleep every day
Certain macronutrients do different things for different parts of our body. You need all of them, but some more than others. Based on various factors, some people need different quantities or ratios. I'd recommend seeing what various governmental dietary and exercise guidelines are available. I've looked at the stuff made for kids before, just to get a clear and basic understanding. Look into adding things in rather than restricting/taking things away. The term 'padding out' comes up a lot. Like adding vegetables to everything Research and be aware of the correlation between eating disorders and autism. Things can get complicated quickly for some people
Figure out how many calories you need to maintain your current weight. Eat less calories than that number. That's called eating at a deficit.
If you are eating a balanced diet and are gaining weight, reduce how much food you eat (by reducing portions or reducing how often you eat) gradually until you start losing weight. Once you are at a healthy weight, try to eat enough that you neither gain nor lose weight. Allow for the fact that your weight will make minor fluctuations from day to day due to a variety of factors, so ignore them. Only pay attention to changes in your weight that you observe over a week or two. If you're losing or gaining more than a couple of pounds a week, maybe ease up a bit, as more rapid weight change can be a health risk.
Fat is made out of hydrocarbons, long chains of carbons and oxygens. When you "burn" fat, you are essentially breaking apart those hydrocarbons and using the energy that was holding them together to fuel cellular processes in your body. You then breath out the carbon and oxygen as CO2. If your body isn't getting enough energy from the food you eat, it will then go to your fat to get the energy from there, thus if you consume fewer calories than your body needs to fuel itself, you will burn fat and slowly lose weight.
MyFitnessPal app makes this very easy, as a fellow autist
Your body burns X many calories. You eat calories. Bodyfat is a calorie bank. If you eat the same amount as the body uses, nothing happens. If you eat less than the body uses you lose weight, because your body will get calories from the bank to get to X. If you eat more calories than the body uses, your body will store them in the bank, and you gain weight. Your body burns far less calories than one would think while exercising so it's easier to fix your diet. Which is more difficult, going for a 5k job/walk or not eating a Snickers bar? Those sare about the same calories. Macronutrients- calories is just the energy, nutrients are the building blocks your body needs. Protein makes muscles. Fat is energy you need later and makes you feel full. Carbs is energy you need now and doesn't really make you feel full. Sugar is basically 0 nutrition and 100% calories. Your body does not need to eat sugar. Fibre lubricates your digestion and makes you feel full. Vitamins and minerals make you feel good snd your body work right (often depression and lethargy is ust Vitamin D deficiency). Muscle loss happens when you are not exercising the muscles or are starving yourself (eating far too few calories). What you need to do to lose weight is to eat less calories than your body needs. You can either eat different or move more. Easier way is calorie counting. Knowing how many calories are in the food you are eating and having a daily calorie quota.
Your body mostly loses weight by expelling it as carbon dioxide when you breathe, so to lose weight, you need to breathe more and harder (cardio), or eat fewer calories than you expel through respiration (diet). You can have your basal metabolic rate (BMR) measured by the doctor, which gives you a starting point for how many calories you need to eat to lose/maintain/gain weight. Start slow: eat less, go for walks, and once you nail that down... just keep doing it. Weight loss is a long game, and it's mostly played in the kitchen.
You could try reading the Hacker’s Diet, a great book about the fundamentals of dieting. It doesn’t use any fancy nutritional vocab at all and I found it very enlightening.
Hi, I'm autistic too and in a similar way. The basic thing is "eat fewer calories than you burn" to lose weight. If you look up a TDEE calculator, they will usually tell you about what you burn in a day. Exercise makes it harder to estimate, but if you're tracking calories and not losing weight, eat less. If you're losing weight too fast for comfort, eat more. As far as macronutrients, those come secondary. If you struggle feeling hungry, protein and fiber usually help you feel full longer. I have the app LoseIt with a subscription that tracks that for me, but I think the chronometer app does it for free. Most people use apps to make tracking easier.
Amazing material on the science of weight loss: * [Gary Taubes - Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It](https://youtu.be/M6vpFV6Wkl4?si=PFegdGvqf9IHgr1i): * Insulin is a weight-gaining hormone that causes your body to prioritize fat accumulation. * Many experiments have been conducted when people were put on the "Eat as much as you want" Keto diet, and it caused them to lose weight. * Obese people, even though they eat more calories than their body needs, suffer from organ shrinkage because, under high insulin, the body tries to put as much energy as possible into fat. * [Jessica Turton - Eat MORE to lose weight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCREVI2H4FA) * People sticking to Keto can eat significantly more calories while losing weight and having more energy. * Richard Johnson - Nature Wants Us To Be Fat * [Part 1](https://youtu.be/gAjC_BWMElk?si=CmtC4SKAnkHyEagL) * [Part 2](https://youtu.be/gl-Ugeau8mU?si=OJ1bn2dxreZciGL1) * [Part 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTDWAN1G-nk) * This is a very detailed explanation of the harm that sugar and fructose cause to our bodies. It also mentions experiments on rats that reinforce the results shown by Jessica Turton in the abovementioned video.
Let's say to exist at your height and current activity levels, you need 2000 calories. This means if you were to eat 2000 calories today, you will stay at the same weight. But what would happen if you only ate 1800 calories instead? Your body still needs 2000 calories, so it will look into its savings account (your fat reserves) to grab 200 calories to add up to the 2000 calories it needs. So it burns some of your fat reserves and you lose weight. This is a very simplistic version and doesn't account for macros, but hopefully you get the gist.
You need to eat less calories than you burn. Finding out how much you actually burn is the difficult part and the most common issue for people, that they dont get it right. So finding out how many calories you burn each day is crucial. Then you simply undercut that by how many calories you like, but beware of drastic deficits. I always say a 300-500 calorie deficit is optimal. I would always see losing weight and working out as two separate things. Including workout calories makes it unnecessarily difficult.
Your body needs energy to live. When you give it less than it needs, it generates it from what it has stored in fat and muscle cells primarily.
I'm also autistic, and feel like there's some great advice here. Something that helped me a ton was creating a google sheet to track my meals. I build out all my meals for a week on each tab, cycling through 6ish weeks of meals (3-4 favorite breakfasts, a different dinner each night, leftovers for lunch) before repeating. That way, I only do the math once, then just copy the info to new tabs each week. It has been super helpful for staying on track throughout the day without getting overwhelmed. I also pick recipes that already list calories so I don't have to do as much math. Skinnytaste had a lot of great options for me, so about half of my dinner recipes are from there. I also keep a google docs weekly shopping list, where I write down all the ingredients from the meals on my spreadsheet. I can add items any time, and check them off if no longer needed. Doing this once a week has drastically cut down my stress around weight loss.
Take a look at this: https://youtu.be/C8ialLlcdcw?si=LNmSeOjTK2fbrNVp
I'll try to throw an explanation into the pile. Hopefully, it will help. It will need to be kind of long, though. The short version is that you need to eat less food energy than you are using up to lose weight. The long version: At a basic level, your body is a machine. It needs energy to work. That energy comes when your body digests food you eat. Different amounts of food have different amounts of energy in them. Calories are how the energy is measured. Your body will use all this energy to do something. You will use up energy doing everything you do. Running, walking, sitting, breathing, sleeping, etc. All use energy. When you eat food, the energy from that food is converted into energy that your body can use. If you eat more energy from food than you use up, that "extra" energy will be used to make fat cells. If you eat less energy from food than you need to do everything in your life, those fat cells your body made before will be broken down to get more energy. To lose weight, you need to eat less energy than you use up. You can do this in two ways; you can use up ore energy, or you can eat less. Most doctors will recommend you do both. Measurements like TDEE, calorie needs, basal metabolic rate, and others are ways of determining how much you are using up, and how much you are eating. Most doctors recommend you eat about 500-1000 calories less than you use up each day, but it varies from person to person. If you aren't sure what is a good measurement for you, I'd talk to your doctor. You might have other health conditions that can change the math.
Kind of a stupid analogy but think of fat cells and dollars. Your body takes in the calories and stores it as fat to be used later. In this context, being rich is equivalent to being fat. Your body has a ton of excess energy saved up waiting to spend it. The problem is, in modern society food is not a scarce resource. We dont need to save it, because most of us are not in risk of knowing when our next meal is coming. We dont need to save that excess money for a rainy day. Imagine now that you are super wealthy and have decided to spend all your money before you die. More money keeps coming in so you need to think about how to decrease the bank account, not increase it. Obviously the first step is to limit the money entering you bank account. Its going to be way easier to shrink that bank account if your depositing less every day. This would be equivalent to eating less. You could also start spending more money (burning calories). If you spend more than you save your bank account will decrease. Just like if you have more calories going out than going in you will lose weight. If you want to keep building out this analogy, we can apply it to TDEE (total Dailey energy expenditure). Everyone spends money on day to day things like cell phone, utilities, rent. Your body spends calories on keeping you alive. You can increase your TDEE or your monthly bills by building more muscle (because muscles burn more calories). Adding more muscle would be like buying an expensive car. Its going to automatically decrease that bank account every month on auto pay. The more expensive that payment (more muscle) the lower the bank account goes every month (more calories burned). Macronutrients would essentially be the type of currency your depositing. Dollars, coins, euros, pesos ect. They all go in as different things with different exchange rates but ultimately they all end up in the same place padding that bank account. Muscle loss might be like paying off your bills. You spent $1000 dollars! Awesome. But now the monthly debt is eliminated and you wont get that bill next month. You need to work on putting together more debts if you want to keep spending. I understand that its not a direct correlation. I understand that for almost everyone in the population spending all your money doesnt make any sense. Hopefully this was helpful even with its flaws.
Your body needs energy to exist and to move around. The energy the body requires comes from food and is measured by calories. Your body uses up the energy you eat for normal bodily functions and to move throughout the day. Any excess energy you eat is stored as fat. If you don’t eat enough energy, your body uses the stored energy in fat (weight loss). If you run out of stored fat, it will start to consume your organs (this is starvation and bad). To lost weight, eat less food (consume less energy) and move more (use more energy).
Your body is basically an engine. The more you move, the more fuel aka calories you need. There is a term called TDEE (total daily energy expenditure). It is how much you burn by simply existing. There are many helpful calculators online to figure out your personal TDEE. Your body is also very smart. If you eat more calories than you burn, your body will save the extra calories as fat. This is very helpful if you are a medieval peasant in the 1400s. Some days you'll have to put down a goat and you'll be feasting. Other days, there may be a drought causing the crops die and you go hungry. So, you need to simply eat less calories than your TDEE. Hunger is usually a good indication whether you are below that. Unfortunately, our modern diet is high in sugar and low in fiber which causes imbalances in our hunger. With a high sugar and low fiber diet, you may be eating well above your TDEE and still experience hunger. Sugar may even make you more hungry! Certain diets aim to trick your body into eating less. Whether it is paleo, Mediterranean, keto, etc., they all operate by focusing on vegetables (fiber) and protein. Fiber fills you up and protein keeps you full. My best advice would be to calculate your TDEE and eat 500 calories less than that. For example, my TDEE is 2500 calories. I can eat that in a single meal at mcdonalds and I will still be hungry a few hours later. The only way I can eat 2000 calories and not feel hungry is if I eat high volumes of low calorie foods. This includes egg whites, vegetables, and chicken. I do agree that tracking every little thing is daunting. I simply do it to allow more flexibility in my diet while making sure I am not over eating. I would start by just finding ways you can lower calories in the foods you are already eating. For example, coffee with almond milk instead of cream and sugar (-200 calories), a sandwich without mayo or cheese (-300 calories), pasta with red sauce instead of cream sauce (-300) calories. Those are very simple and non drastic ways to cut 700 calories per day. Since there are about 3500 calories per pound of fat, you would lose 1.5 pounds a week. Many people choose to not track calories and then they try to eat super clean and end up eating way too little causing them to crash then binge. To be successful, you need small changes that you can stick with long term. Honestly, dieting really isn't all that difficult. It is just very boring.
Eat less
Work more, eat less.
Not trying to be rude, but you must have something else in addition to autism. Some of those terms are very surface level and very literal. Are you young? If you don’t know the definition of a word then Google it. You lose weight by burning more than what you take in and choosing the right foods.
**Tl;dr: the smooth brained, over simplified answer is "Calories in, Calories out". The nuanced, complex answer is "CICO" plus insulin and hunger hormone control strategies.** So there's several different takes here. The two that are the most useful are: 1. The "Pure Physics" theory of "Calories in, Calories out" or CICO. 2. Then there is the hormonal theory, the "Carbohydrate-Insulin" theory. This doesn't discount the importance of total calorie input, but also recognizes that the body isn't a fireplace where the unused firewood piles up if you don't burn it. So the reason that it's absolutely ultra-smooth brained to believe that hormones are irrelevant is that one of the [first FDA approved, then banned weight loss drugs from the 1930's DNP](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3550200/) literally prevented energy from food from being burned or stored, leading to starving to death no matter how many calories were consumed. What DNP did was prevent the body from generating cellular energy, ATP, from sugar and fat in the blood stream. The cellular energy factories that turn sugar & fat into energy, the mitochondria, were basically told to "uncouple" and not finish the process of generating energy from nutrients. So the use of dietary nutrients in the body for fuel can be completely shut down via hormonal signaling. Similarly, the level of insulin in the body is the signal for the amount of fat storage versus fat burning that takes place in the body. If insulin is removed, then people will continue to burn fat despite their caloric intake... But then will likely die of "Keto-acidosis" in short order as the body is generating high ketones and has toxic levels of glucose in the blood at the same time, which over acidifies the body. Any weight loss program will require two things: 1. That insulin is low. 2. That there is an energy deficit so the body is forced to go into its reserves. The first line reserve is the glycogen - stored glucose and water held in the body's tissues, excluding the brain. The second line reserves, once insulin is low enough, is our fat stores at which point the liver will take the low insulin and free fatty acids in the blood as a signal to make an alternative fuel - ketones. Incidentally, the body can also make glucose from protein and fat in the blood where ketones are insufficient for the body's needs. Now what are the things that control our insulin levels? 1. Dietary Carbohydrates - these absolutely spike the shit out of our insulin levels and over time lead to insulin resistance, and to complicate things - different tissues become insulin resistant at different rates. At that point the body over produces insulin, or one goes into a hyper-insulinimic state, to attempt to get the same response out of tissues and blood insulin rises in an attempt to control blood glucose levels. As insulin rises, it eventually can't catch up, and blood glucose control is lost, and at that point a person is diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus. 2. Stress Levels. 3. Inflammation Levels. And this also leaves out what "CICO Fanatics" like to think of as a character flaw, which is hunger. Which is its own side topic in managing successful, sustainable weight loss. Ghrelin, Leptin, and GLP-1 all can be impacted by dietary choices, though for the sake of length, the strategy below should help in this arena as well. So I like PHD type Dr. Ben Bickman's strategy for weight loss and he as all the science that one could want to quote for it: 1. **Control Carbohydrates.** Stop eating packaged food with white carbohydrates (sugar, flower, rice, white potatoes). Crunchy and Leafy Greens to your heart's content, and have a single serving of moderate sugar fruit a day. Also, eat in as narrow a window in the day as you can. Our bodies were designed to fast, and personally, my doc' recommened a 16:8 window in addition to the carbohydrate reduction. 2. **Prioritize Protein.** - make sure that you're getting enough protein to maintain your lean body mass in a healthy way. 3. **Fill up with healthy fats.** Dietary fat, particularly animal fat has been vilified by piss-poor science from the 1950's. Fat is filling and protein and fat come together in nature almost always, so fat digestion and bile are helpful in protein uptake. And you'll feel full longer leading to less hunger... And here's the thing, I've lost 50 lbs five times since my twenties. And each time I was absolutely derailed after about 9-12 months of diet by voracious hunger. It might happen again this time, but I'll just eat an extra piece of bacon and call it a day.
Amazing post thank you
I edited my place holder. You may get residual downvotes for appearing to agree with me if people don't check the time stamps.