Losing weight is easy, I’ve done it lots of times!

Monday, 27 October 2025 14:00

Wait, what? Yeah, I’ve done a few big diet runs in the past and regained lost weight, and then some. This April I started again, but did it better. I lost 19 kilograms in four months. I reached that point in late August, but wanted to give it at least two months before declaring victory publicly. Now I can tell you: the weight stayed down over conferences, vacation, holidays, and birthday parties. This looks sustainable. Let’s talk about it.

The screenshot above is my weight graph from my Withings scale. I can recommend a device like that, it updates your information without you having to input it manually. A few details aside ¹, I hope it paints a pretty clear picture.

Back in 2015 I lost 13 kilos and immediately wrote about it ², but it didn’t last. Since 2018 I consistently hit 80 kilograms every year despite going on diets multiple times, in two separate cases losing over 10kg at a time. Those runs didn’t last either.

This time it looks like I discovered a combination of things that actually looks sustainable. I don’t have anything to sell you, and I don’t even want to convince you that you should follow what I’m about to describe. Just sharing my journey!

tl;dr

Things that did it for me:

1. Totally eliminate added sugar, refined grains, and industrial seed oils from your diet. Instead, eat meat, fish, fowl, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds. These foods align with our genetic expectations since humans have been eating them for a million years. Some people call this diet “paleo”, some call it “keto”.
2. Only eat two meals a day, six hours (or less) apart. Do not ever snack, do not ever eat outside of your eating window. This isn’t trivial but it’s easier than you think, because without sugar, grains and seed oils you don’t feel hunger much. Your body starts burning stored fat consistently and effectively.
3. While losing weight, don’t overdo sports. Don’t risk overcompensating during meals. Don’t risk hunger. Instead, just move around all day. You end up burning similar calorie counts anyway!

Yup, no ozempic.

The list of books I recommend is at the end of the post. Now, let’s dive in deeper.

Added sugar ruins everything

This is really the most important insight in this post, so I’m starting with that right away. Stop eating added sugar, it really messes with your body’s perception of hunger, insulin production, and is frankly addictive. Getting off the high-speed train to obesity and diabetes isn’t easy, but it is simple. Drop added sugar.

I really do mean it when I say it ain’t easy. It turns out sugar is added to nearly everything these days. You need to be constantly vigilant about what you’re buying or ordering out. That’s not really fun, but a worthwhile price to pay.

And yeah, it’s also not easy because of your brain. It takes a few days for the body to readjust, the sugar addiction is no joke. But it gets easier with time! Literally the most tricky bit to navigate is social-induced eating. Eating as an activity, not as nourishment. Meetings with people that involve cakes, cookies, beer, lemonade, sodas, etc. It can be done, but you might end up being that person who tells everyone about their diet 🤷🏻‍♂️

When you completely cease to eat added sugar, you magically become much less hungry the entire time. It’s true, I experienced it during my weight loss phase. In fact, I experience this right now writing this sentence. So you really need to cut out all added sugar, no exceptions. If you don’t, you’ll be constantly craving sugary things. You’ll keep snacking on small caloric bombs that aren’t satisfying. You’ll keep overeating. I know that’s how it is for me.

Sadly, dropping sugar alone is not enough for effective weight loss.

Other insulin-spiking foods

The biggest bummer for me was learning that refined grains also cause rapid spikes in blood sugar, demanding high insulin output. This includes all flour-based foods like breads, tortillas, and pasta. So you need to drop that, too. Yeah, this is not a walk in the park. That’s such a big part of the standard diet that dropping all of it is admittedly both a psychological challenge and a challenge for eating out. You essentially want “gluten-free options”.

On top of this, industrial seed oils disrupt metabolic functioning and promote insulin resistance. This includes canola oil and sunflower oil, both of which are extremely popular in Poland for cooking and inclusion in grocery products. Switching to olive oil and avocado oil is easy enough for cooking, but finding products in grocery stores that use those oils instead of canola oil can be challenging.

These foods are also nutrient-deficient, contributing to overeating and cravings. Once you stop eating them, feeling hungry really becomes a non-issue. Your body switches to processing stored fat, and so you’re not dying for a snack. Plus, really, you won’t die from not eating for a few hours. Do something else. You will eat something soon enough!

Of course, that is easy to say. The remaining challenge is psychological. I used to eat as entertainment. I’d watch a show so I’d nibble at something. I’d have a snack to self-soothe during frustrating work tasks. I’d meet with a friend over coffee and cake. When you stop doing that, there’s a voice in the back of your head poking you to “do what you always do”. To not be weird. But this gets better after a while.

Intermittent eating

As I said, once you cut out foods that make eating less very unpleasant, intermittent fasting isn’t such a big deal anymore. And indeed fasting is the remaining non-negotiable bit in weight loss. Your alternative is diligent calorie counting, which is a ton of work and hard to do precisely enough. Been there, done that. It’s much easier to adopt an eating schedule.

This time, during the weight loss phase I employed the “every-other-day” method, meaning that on fast days I consumed “at most 500kcal”. As I said, I didn’t count the calories, just made sure it was a really minor lunch. Usually in form of a latte and some nuts, or some kefir with fruit, or a light lunch like a few eggs with mayo and some vegetables.

On eating days, I ate lunch and six hours later had dinner. So, only two meals a day. No snacking in-between. Somewhat extreme, huh? Don’t worry, it was much easier to do than it sounds. The key is that once you’re off sugar (and in ketosis), the body receives the energy it needs. That energy comes from your stored fat. You’re losing weight! On eat days, you don’t have to worry about counting calories during your two meals. Eat as much as you want, there’s no way you can overeat with a regimen so strict.

And I can tell you from experience: even during fast days, you’re not irritable on ketosis, you’re not losing focus while working, you’re not hangry. This is much better than my previous attempts at every-other-day diet where I’d have a pretty short fuse on fast days. Not this time! Turns out insulin spikes were the problem all along.

I spent four months doing “every-other-day” fasting and then I migrated to two meals a day each day. This is what I’m doing now and my weight is stable. Sure, it fluctuates, but the trend line is flat.

Everything must go

You can’t outrun a bad diet. Not only is it pretty hard to burn off even a few hundred kcal in indulgent sweets, but also the body compensates exercise-driven calorie burning by increasing appetite and reducing non-exercise activity.

Dieticians will tell you that you have to watch out when you employ intermittent fasting, because your body will also shed muscle, especially if you’re not working out at the same time. They call it “liquidating your assets” and prescribe advanced methods to avoid this from happening. While I agree it’s an important consideration, this time around I decided to adopt the much easier strategy of “everything must go”.

You see, in my previous attempts, I tried to boost dieting with cardio. It never worked well. I felt more hungry after workouts and it seemed like I was overcompensating when eating, even when I actively tried not to! Somehow, I kept being hungry and overeating at the same time. That was pretty frustrating.

Moreover, even when I was working out at the gym or clocking 5000 kilometers a year on the bicycle, I still experienced muscle loss. It was easy to tell, because my sport performance declined. But worst of all, the pairing of sport with dieting made daily weight scale measurements hard, because the unpredictable muscle mass fluctuation interfered with tracking weight loss. While your body is healthily readjusting its composition from fat to muscle, you could be seeing long-term weight plateaux on the scale, which can be pretty disheartening when you’re trying to get the number to go down.

So yeah, this time I didn’t worry about muscle loss at all and I didn’t pursue any sport besides daily walks until I was done with weight loss. In fact, now that I’m done with weight loss, I still mostly just keep walking. There’s a book recommendation about that alone.

What helps me not forget about moving throughout the day is the gamification aspect that comes with my Apple Watch. It’s one of those dumb mind tricks that work even if you know that you subject yourself to them. Even if I rarely close the rings on every day of the month, thanks to the watch I definitely do it more often than not.

Issues with my approach

I wouldn’t be honest in the post if I didn’t share the negative aspects of going against the grain (pun not intended!). So let’s be clear: radically changing your dietary habits will be a shock to your organism. The very first days might even feel like a positive shock since the body will kick into gear to try and compensate for this newfound famine situation. But soon enough, you’ll notice some peculiar effects. You can expect:

• gastrointestinal issues: those pass after your gut microbiome readjusts;
• sleepiness: this also passes, but early on use it to your advantage (you can’t feel sorry for yourself when you’re not awake!);
• muscle loss: with the “everything must go” approach, it is inevitable you will become physically weaker;
• keto breath: for me this didn’t really go away, it fluctuates between barely there and mildly off-putting (get mints);
• becoming That Guy at social gatherings: you will say “no” to beer (even non-alcoholic) and cake, this can be a bit awkward at times;
• days of pretty bad craving: fortunately this isn’t often, but admittedly every now and again something would trigger a pretty harsh psychological want for a snack – in this case, I go for dark chocolate (80%+ cocoa), berry fruit, peanut butter, or straight-up fancy nuts;
• days of failure: oops, you overextended your eating window by a few hours, or ate three meals, or had sugar, bread, or pasta! Okay, it happened, not a biggie, just do not slip twice in a row. Do not allow yourself to fail again in quick succession. Do not make it a habit.

There’s also the issue of the right headspace. I want to be perfectly clear that I don’t know why I had the willpower to pull through this time around. How did I manage to muster it in 2025 when I failed for the past eight years? I honestly don’t know. My wife was a good accountability partner here, so that’s definitely helpful. The books I recommend below were pretty motivating, as was seeing effects pretty quickly. But I’m afraid I don’t have any pro tips beyond that.

The payoff

TMI alert, haha. The pictures below aren’t particularly scientific, I wasn’t too careful when taking them. It’s just a way to show you the scale of change if we don’t know each other in person. One thing you can see the diet didn’t help with is hair styling.

Of course, the benefits go far beyond losing the beer belly. I again fit in pants that I couldn’t wear since before the pandemic. But most importantly, I feel much much better physically, and I have (Apple Watch-estimated) data to prove it:

• My walking heart rate average in January was 113 BPM. Now it’s 98 BPM.
• My cardio heart rate recovery ³ is now at 37 BPM. This time last year it was 23 BPM.
• My VO2 max is at 37 now. It was below 28.5 this time last year, despite me going to the gym regularly!

There’s also the matter of “BMI”, which currently is viewed by professionals as a pretty weak metric. I have to agree since if I gained weight now through muscle and not fat, that would make my BMI look worse, while I would have been physically in an objectively better condition. But as a dumb rule of thumb that’s trivial to calculate, knowing that I’m firmly in the middle of the “normal range” is still a good feeling.

A better metric is the waist to height ratio. The value should be less than 50% in healthy adults, and currently that is true in my case. Again, the slim-fit pants don’t lie.

Book recommendations

I can’t say I recommend those books as “must reads”. They are all flawed in their own little ways. But this is the book combo that helped me. To be clear, I don’t personally know the authors and have no commercial interest in you reading those books. The links below aren’t even affiliate links.

“Presto! How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales” by Penn Jillette is my first recommendation, especially in the audiobook form that is read by the author. I recommend it not really for the diet in particular (which is pretty crazy), but rather for the mindset it put me in. It’s also very funny.

Krista Varady’s “The Every-Other-Day Diet” is a pretty bad book about a genius way to approach weight loss. It spends 220 pages to tell you something that could be fully described in a blog post. It repeats itself a lot and spends an annoying amount of focus on self-advertisement. But even despite those flaws, I’m happy I read it. Intermittent fasting is a powerful way to lose weight, and the particular method described by Varady is the only kind of intermittent fasting that actually ever worked for me for weight loss.

“Two Meals a Day” by Mark Sisson and Brad Kearns isn’t really just about intermittent eating, but rather about “the Big Three": added sugar, refined grains, and industrial seed oils. It really drives home that eating those three creates a carbohydrate dependency and excessive insulin production, which makes it hard for the body to access and burn stored body fat. There’s some product placement in the book, it’s overly wordy at 320 pages, and the writing style reminds me too much of infomercials. But the information therein is good. I was able to independently confirm the claims from the book. The audiobook version is read by Kearns and he’s great at it.

“Born To Walk” by Mark Sisson and Brad Kearns isn’t really about the diet, although it does rehash some content from “Two Meals a Day”. It’s about the wonders of staying in motion throughout the day, and embracing walking instead of overly intensive cardio sports like running. Similarly to the other books here, it’s somewhat drawn out and sometimes reads like a sales pitch. But, again, it’s driven by data and research that you can confirm yourself. My wife and I definitely benefited from reading it. And you can listen to the audio book version while walking!

Where do we go from here

So will this be the last time I lost weight? I certainly hope so. Maintenance is its own journey. And I haven’t seriously considered picking up a sport again, but I should at least resume resistance training. That’s still ahead of us.

As for you, you do you. I’m not here to preach. But if you want to talk about this stuff, I’m more than happy to.

#Lifestyle