I’ll share what’s been working for me the past year. Last June, I was fed up with extra weight. I was at the heaviest I had ever been, and was ready to do whatever to lose it. I went back to Anthony Colpo’s Fat Loss Bible, and started tracking food in cronometer, and using an old fitbit and hitting at least 10,000 steps a day. I knew this had worked in the past, and it started working again. I had stopped using my fitibit because of some of the tracking/privacy concerns, but really, I got to a point where I was more sick of being really fat, and said screw it, and used it anyway. That certainly got things going back in the right direction.
I like Colpo’s book a lot, and I think Calories are a very important factor in weight loss, but I think the idea that you can never raise your resting metabolic rate is hogwash. Still, I was using a modest deficit, not battling hunger, willing to take diet breaks, all while looking for other things to get metabolism working better. Mike Fave does a good review of that Wlodek paper, about how lower calorie intakes can still lead to weight gain, proposing a block in the Krebs cycle and overactivation of FAS. It made me think of it like a clogged sink….. yeah, the ultimate solution is to clear the clog in the pipe, but while you are working on that clog, you shouldn’t be adding a lot of unnecessary water to the sink.
All that being said, I tried to cut calories more from fat and upping walking, rather than cutting back on carbs.
I also came up with 13 principles to experiment with along the way. The first, and overarching, is belief or mindset. My belief is that it’s best to either think in the positive (eg, “I am lean,” “I am getting leaner”) or think in questions (eg, “how do I get more fit? How do I up my metabolism?), and not think in the negative, or what you don’t want (eg, “I’m fat, I’ll never lose weight”). If the positive affirmations don’t feel right, start asking yourself questions about them instead. That will get you thinking and focusing on where you want to go, instead of what you don’t want.
The other 12 are principles, and I’ll just list them off-
1. Get more red and infrared light
2. Increase Carbon Dioxide, and retention
3. Live at higher altitude, or simulate altitude.
4. Deplete PUFA/Lower MUFA (both in body and diet)
5. Increase Anti-inflammatory Amino Acid to Inflammatory AA ratio (or more simply, glycine/methionine)
6. Increase NAD+/NADH ratio
7. Keep Iron (Ferritin) near deficiency
8. Increase Testosterone to Cortisol ratio.
9. Keep Thyroid levels high
10. Keep Vitamins and Minerals abundant, (Vitamin A, B1, Niacinamide, Biotine, D, E, K2, calcium, magnesium, and sodium, to name the ones I really focus on.
11. Increase Dopamine to Serotonin Ratio
12. Improve Digestion
There’s some overlap, some have very simple and easy solutions, others might take time, and others might require a major life change. But, you can play around with a few or all of them at different times. I really started focusing on the Glycine to Methionine ratio, and really adding a lot of Glycine and gelatin and collagen to my diet in October. That led me to discover beef tendon, which led me to experiment with a very low fat diet for a couple months, and I that is a tool which I might bust out again, but probably only for couple months, max, at any time. The crazy thing, with the low fat, high glycine/gelatin diet, I got super smooth skin on my elbows and heals which had been very rough before. That wasn’t even something I was that concerned with, but it was a nice bonus. The smooth heals and elbows have stayed, even when I went back to a higher level of fat (but still pretty high glycine/gelatin).
Oh, and as for results, in a year, I dropped 50 pounds, 6 pants sizes, and 6 inches off my belly.
I’ll try and answer other questions you might have, or if you are interested in anything I did for any of the other principles. At this point, I’ve done at least something with all 12, and have plans to do more with them in the future.
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