Ask HN: What's the current best research/understanding of healthy weight loss?

Sustainable weight loss requires a holistic approach across 4 main areas:

  1. Diet - healthy eating habits that result in a caloric deficit while giving you the required energy
  2. Exercise - strengthen your body, contribute to caloric deficit, improve how you feel. Start slow and prevent injuries.
  3. Psychology - work on the reasons that caused the excessive weight and develop habits that help maintain weight loss in the long term
  4. Medication - use of semaglutide and other GLP-1 medications in support of the above

Combining these will set you up well for results. It will still not be easy, it will still take a long time, but it can be done.

Keep in mind that people are strongly opinionated about things like diet and exercise, but certainly in case of severe obesity, any exercise and any caloric deficit is better than none. Don't listen too much to people who have no been overweight before, they don't speak from experience. My personal view is to work towards a combination of cardio, strength and mobility work, but most important is to find something you think is fun or exciting, as the habit-forming aspect is key. The rest will follow.

Diet. What works for me is to eliminate all processed carbs. This not a keto diet as you still to have sugar from sweet potatoes, milk, and fresh fruit.

I tried this in 2017 and am doing it again now, but less aggressively now. In 2017 I lost 30 pounds in just under 3 months. I was not exercising and I greatly increased my calorie intake, especially of fatty meats. The weight still fell off gradually and consistently.

You can also accelerate this with a cheat meal one day a week. A cheat meal is a meal that completely breaks the diet with a large high sugar item. This will cause your blood sugar to spike and rapidly accelerate your metabolism through the next day but will also result in a minor hungover sensation.

Greatly reducing caffeine also helps as caffeine can result in inflammation and blood flow restriction.

It haven't changed. It's all about discipline: with eating and moving your body. There's no alternative to that so the best way is to keep trying until you figure out what works for you.

I don't know about research but I find Huberman's podcast quite reliable and a useful starting point when I go doing my own research.

This one, for example

https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/essentials-lose-fat-with...