Stop Giving People Unsolicited Advice on Weight Loss.

Seriously. Stop it.

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

(Audio version here)

I recently reported that, over the course of 2024, I have lost 6 stone (84 lbs, 38kg) and that I feel significantly better for this. I’m not quite at the halfway mark and intend to continue this progress throughout 2025.

January 2024

January 2025

The vast majority of comments on this were positive, complimentary and encouraging but, as always, there were some that said some variation on: “You should stop doing that “eating less and moving more” thing that clearly works and is sustainable for you & instead exclusively eat one kind of food that you don’t particularly like and only within a one hour window.”

I am largely resigned now to the reality that, for some people, there is no amount of weight I could lose, no degree of steadiness and consistency of this, or any length of time I could sustain and maintain that weight loss that would convince them I am actually doing the right things to achieve my goal. and should be either encouraged to continue getting on with doing that or simply left alone. I doubt that even showing them bloodwork which reveals that I was one point away from being prediabetic and now am a more comfortable distance away from that, that I had slightly elevated cholesterol and now I don’t, that I was in the early stages of fatty liver disease and now am not or giving them far too much information that, this time last year, my ovaries did not work but now they do would shift them from this position.

Nor am I ever likely to convince fans of specific diets - most often the ketogenic or carnivore ones, but occasionally vegan ones or one that consists entirely of eggs or cabbage soup - that this simply is not a sustainable long-term plan for me. I believe that, with the rather obsessive keto/carnivore advocates in particular, they have found this to suit them very well and find it hard to comprehend that other people just really don’t like fat and meat very much and that eating only food one does not like is miserable and thus not a realistic long-term plan. I did once stick to a ketogenic diet for three months because it was then known as the ‘epileptic diet’ and I am epileptic and also have other, more disabling, neurological problems caused by the cyst on my brain. This does reduce inflammation of the brain and did have quite clear beneficial effects for my headaches, double vision & balance problems. It also resulted in some weight loss but I suspect that this was mostly because I was so sick of meat and fat after three days that I preferred to fast until I got really hungry rather than try to stomach any more of it. This resulted in significant muscle loss and, for reasons I don’t quite understand, the aggravation of my tendency to kidney infections. It had to be abandoned.

Then there are other people who want to know my methods because they too wish to lose weight and have not found a way of doing so that is effective or sustainable. I can tell them this, but I don’t think it would be likely to be very helpful. My methods are:

I eat three meals between 400 and 500 calories each. When well enough, I walk or cycle between half an hour and an hour before breakfast depending on what the weather is like and most nights I do a workout in my gym or the local gym before dinner, generally for about half an hour. Sometimes, when I have a big writing deadline looming. I don't do that but just get up for 10 minutes a few times a day and do a burst of something in my gym or speedwalk around the block. I currently still burn 2000 calories a day just existing because I am still very overweight so even when I am unwell & mostly lying down, I still lose at least 1lb a week. When I am able to be fully active, I burn about 3000 calories a day and lose about 3lbs a week.

My hypothesis is if that I eat and move approximately the right amount for a slim and fit woman of 5 ft 9, that is what I will steadily become. I am quite confident of this hypothesis because for most of my adult life I have been a slim and fit woman of 5 ft 9 and that is how I did it. I did not, for most of my life have to think too much about it. The occasions I have been overweight, obese or morbidly obese have correlated so closely with consuming slightly, significantly or hugely more calories than I burned that I highly doubt this is a coincidence.

The reason I do not think it would be helpful for me to tell other people who are struggling with their weight that my methods are ‘eat less, move more’ is because it is highly unlikely that they have not already tried this. They have probably tried it in multiple different ways. It also doesn’t really answer the question they were asking. “How are you successfully overcoming a tendency to be fat?” The answer to that is that I don’t actually have a tendency to be fat. The reason I am losing weight so successfully and without too much of a struggle (at the moment) or having to think obsessively about food or exercise is because when I am physically and mentally well, I naturally have rather too much energy and enjoy walking, running and cycling and I have an appetite that is satisfied by the number of calories needed to maintain a weight of around 10 stone 10 (150lbs).

The only real advice I could give based on my own experience is:

Try not to need medication for epilepsy or neuropathic pain that makes you really hungry and sluggish.

Don’t get disabled and end up having to spend most of your time sitting around feeling miserable.

Try not to address political issues that make people yell abuse at you all the time/let your parents die/have a major depressive episode due to a combination of those things

If you are going to have a stressful job, experience grief or suffer depression, try to be one of those people whose appetite is either not affected or reduced by such events rather than someone who sits around and comfort eats.

I just don’t think those will be applicable to very many people and those to whom something like the first ones do apply will already be well aware of the impacts of this and unlikely to be asking this question. Ozempic offers some hope to those of us in this situation. I was recently informed that it is already being prescribed with some success to people who need to take long-term antipsychotic medication which is notorious for causing massive weight gain and a common reason that people stop taking it leading them to become dangerously mentally unwell again. I will certainly take it should I have another neurological accident and sustain nerve damage requiring centrally-acting medication. I have tried it but, because it works by reducing excessive hunger and this is not an issue I have unless taking medication, it did not make any measurable difference to my rate of weight loss or the sustainability of it.

My experience with medication that makes me hungry way beyond the calorific intake my body needs to sustain a healthy weight makes me very sympathetic to people who find they have this problem naturally. I’m afraid that I was once one of those people with a moderate appetite and a lot of energy who thought everybody could maintain a healthy weight if they just paid attention to their calorific intake and took more exercise, and that they just weren’t trying hard enough. Now that I know how miserable it is to be hungry all the time and how hard it is to concentrate on anything else when one is hungry, I have reconsidered this position and am glad I never said any such thing to anybody complaining of having trouble losing excess weight. My friend, Iona Italia, has spoken openly and privately to me about the daily struggles she has to battle through a persistent gnawing hunger to maintain her weight which is not medically overweight but higher than the (still healthy) weight that she finds ideal for her as a dancer.

I remain unconvinced that a predisposition to having an excessive appetite explains everybody who is overweight or constantly battling not to be, though. This is often claimed to be genetic but, if so, these genes must have appeared from somewhere over the last century as our grandparents’ generation did not have high levels of obesity. It seems quite clear that cultural factors including the expansion of portion sizes and easily available junk food play a role here and so cultural initiatives to provide education and information on appetising, nutritious and filling meals remains important. Fat Activists who oppose this as part of an unhealthy and fatphobic ‘diet culture’ are profoundly unhelpful to the people they claim to wish to support.

Fat Activists are the other people who generally respond negatively to me consistently losing weight by eating three healthy meals a day, going for walks in the morning and working out in the evening. They point out, with considerable evidence, that diets simply do not work longterm and that the majority of people who lose a significant amount of weight regain it again. Further, they argue that ‘weight cycling’ is worse for the body than being consistently fat. For example, in Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia, Kate Manne writes.

“In one important meta-analysis, UCLA researchers set out to establish that dieting helps people to lose weight in the long term. “We found that the evidence shows the opposite,” said Janet Tomiyama, a member of the research team: in other words, it doesn’t. They analyzed thirty-one long-term diet studies—virtually every available study that tracked people for two to five years—in the most comprehensive and rigorous analysis of this kind to date. The lead researcher, Traci Mann, summarized their findings thus: “You can initially lose 5 to 10 percent of your weight on any number of diets, but then the weight comes back. We found that the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more.” Only a small minority of participants showed sustained weight loss. The majority showed complete weight regain. Many people—between one-and two-thirds—regained more weight than they lost within a four-to five-year period. Far from helping people to lose weight, dieting may hence be counterproductive on this score. “Several studies indicate that dieting is actually a consistent predictor of future weight gain,” said Tomiyama.”

Not only is weight loss incredibly difficult to maintain, but the process of losing and almost inevitably regaining weight repeatedly—known as “weight cycling”—turns out to be very hard on the human body. It is linked to a variety of health problems: cardiovascular disease and strokes, metabolic conditions, worsened immune function, and yes, even diabetes. For the majority of the people who were studied, Mann thus holds that they would have been better off not dieting to begin with; there would be no major difference to their weight, and their overall health would be better. “Dieting is not effective in treating obesity,” Mann concluded. “The benefits of dieting are too small and the potential harm is too large.”

However, while I have no grounds to doubt the data presented, I am sceptical of the framing of these two claims and suspect they rely on faulty assumptions.

Claim 1: Diets do not work to produce long-term weight loss.

This claim appears to rest on a very specific understanding of the concept of ‘diet’ and refer to a short-term programme intended to result in weight loss. It should not be surprising to anyone that a short-term diet plan only worked in the short-term. This is inevitable in the same way that a short-term programme of housecleaning would not keep a house clean forever and that it would become dirty again after the programme stopped. This claim that a short-term diet programme cannot make people lose weight long-term would not, of course, justify a claim that diet, understood in the common sense to refer to what someone eats, does not correlate with maintaining a healthy weight longterm. To justify this, one would have to look at a control group - people who maintain a healthy weight for most or all of their lives - and investigate what it was that was enabling that. I suspect it is related to what they eat - their diet.

Claim 2: Weight cycling is so bad for the body that people are better off not ‘dieting’ to begin with.

This relies on the claim that ‘dieting’ (the short-term programme which is not sustained) makes no major long-term difference to weight and, with all else being equal, it is better for the body weight to remain stable (if high) than to cycle. I am sceptical of this. It seems to assume that somebody who is prone to being overweight and makes no attempts to address this will remain quite stably overweight. For example, somebody whose body weight is slim at 2000 calories a day but who eats 2500 calories a day will settle at whatever degree of overweight 2500 calories produces. But is that the case? It seems unlikely. If one is still hungry eating only the 2000 calories required to maintain their body at a healthy weight and so eats 2500 calories and produces a bigger body that requires 2500 to maintain it, might this not result in a corresponding increase in appetite? Is this not how weight creeps up and up and up? In my observation and (admittedly anecdotal) experience, it is.

Here is a record of my weight fluctuations over the last six years. This represents an ongoing battle to control my weight against the forces of both medication and a major depressive episode. From 2021-2022, I surrendered for a while.

At my heaviest (25.5 stone), I was thoroughly disabled by fatness and my breathing was severely impacted. My cardio fitness was as poor as my fitbit could measure. Having now lost 6 of those stones, I can again walk, cycle and use the gym, my breathing is much better and the most recent test of my VO2 Max is encouraging.

Would it really have been better for me not to have consciously adjusted my diet to one that enabled that weight loss? Should I not have kept battling my weight all this time, bringing it down when I could in between bouts of increase? What would have happened if none of those downward trends had been achieved? I suspect that, by now, I’d be dead and one of the cases where the side of the house had to be removed to get the body out.

Of course, my experience is not universalizable and Fat Activists make solid points about the unwisdom of expecting short-term diet programmes to effect long-term change. There really are some very unhealthy and unrealistic ‘diet’ programmes out there and using them to yoyo cannot be healthy. Seek medical advice on how to manage your weight in a healthy way! But Fat Activists do their own cause and the people they seek to support a disservice when they conflate faddish, short-term “diets” with “what one habitually eats” and discourage those of us seeking to establish a healthy and sustainable mode of eating and exercising that is enjoyable and manageable and can be a lifelong habit.

It is very easy to become discouraged when repeated attempts to reduce one’s excess weight fails, and I think this is what motivates some of the activists who tell me my efforts are futile and that I should not encourage others to believe that a healthy weight is either achievable or desirable. Some of the ‘body positivity’ people who have gone so far as to celebrate morbid obesity claim that they are happier this way. I cannot read their minds, but I would be very surprised if this were true. I have already lost the weight of a particularly small female friend of mine. If I finally achieve my customary weight, I will have lost the weight of a large muscular man. I cannot imagine anyone being happier if they had to carry one of those on their back everywhere they went. While nobody should be bullied or pressured into losing weight and unsolicited advice on how to do this is rude and presumptuous, we should probably assume that most heavily overweight people would like to only be carrying around the amount of weight their frame can comfortably support, and devise more ways to help them achieve that.

It seems clear that no single method of sustainably burning more calories than one consumes until one is a healthy weight and then sustaining a balance will work for everyone. For me, it is eating three healthy meals a day and exhilarating cardio exercise like running and cycling. For somebody else, it might be a low carb diet and weight lifting. For another, intermittent fasting and swimming. For another a 5/2 diet and dancing. Both food and exercise have to be enjoyable for any healthy lifestyle to be sustainable for the rest of an individual’s life, and I am bewildered that this seems not to be obvious to so many people.

Nevertheless, I will continue to share news of my decreasing weight and increasing fitness because it inspires me and many of you have told me it inspires you too. I am now sadly resigned to the fact that, even though I am demonstrably steadily and consistently losing weight in a way that I can happily continue forever, whenever I do this, some people will pop up and inform me that I am doing it all wrong. Some will tell me I must instead adopt a totally different diet that I will hate while others will tell me I am contributing to fatphobia and an unhealthy “diet culture” and doing myself harm. Both of them will tell me that I am doomed to failure if I think that continuing to eat and move as appropriate for a slim and fit woman of my height will result in me becoming one. Let’s see, shall we?