Weight Cycling: Maintaining the Downcycle
How to lose weight when weightcycling
If you are interested in weight-cycling or losing weight in general, there are a few things to consider.
In general, your body has two aspects to controlling weight, which are deceptively simple: kcalories in, and kcalories out.
kcalories output is determined by your metabolism, which consists of your BMR + Active kcalories. The most important aspect is the, BMR, which depends mostly on your age, height, and body weight, but given this, there is still some variation of about 10%. Another factor that can affect your BMR is whether you’ve recently lost weight. Active kcalories also contribute, but for most people doing most amounts of exercise, is a relatively small adjustment to daily kcalorie output, and typically increases appetite to compensate.
kcalories in is determined by what you eat, and can be controlled through diet. The degree to which it is easy or hard to control your diet is highly variable and depends on appetite. For some, it is pretty easy to lose weight. For others, it can be very difficult. People generally have some baseline level of “appetite”, and going over or under this intake can have people respond more or less viscerally.
Anybody could lose weight if they restrict kcalories, but the amount of psychic damage caused to people to eat at a level below or above appetite for different people varies a lot, and thus different people need different levels of willpower.
There are, however, things that can be done to affect this. The main axes are diet, supplements, and medicines.
Side note: Important prior considerations.
If one is on a kcaloric deficit, one eats fewer or sometimes no nutrients, and thus one may need to supplement nutrients, and make sure one drinks enough water. Make sure you do this.
Diets.
There are countless diets people use for losing weight. There is no single strategy that is effective for everyone, and in general, dieting is not as effective as medical interventions. I can list some ideas anyway. I am not a medical professional though.
One method, as suggested in this post, is to do water fasting. This involves not eating any food, and only drinking water, for multiple days straight. Thus without any food intake, one only has a kcaloric output and no input. This works for some, and people sometimes find that their hunger goes away after around one or two days. But it is important to supplement vitamins and minerals in this case.
Some other ideas, which I won’t list in too much detail:
VLCD / Total Diet Replacement (altering your diet completely can be helpful)
Meal Replacements (which make measurement of intake very easy)
High-Protein (small effect due to it being more satiating, may help retain muscle mass)
Low-Carb (due to entering ketosis)
Intermittent Fasting (people like it, but the effect size is weak)
Mediterranean (also weak effect)
One could consider doing some intermediate of water fasting, but still eating protein powder, to try to preserve more lean body mass also.
Supplements:
There are many supplements, many of which have very little effect. I list a couple that might be useful, but I probably miss most things.
Psyllium / Soluble Fiber, also suggested in this post. One mechanism of appetite is from having your stomach feel full. Eating more fiber shortly before meals with water can improve satiation. Make sure to drink sufficient water as it expands significantly and can lead to dehydration.
Caffeine can also slightly increase metabolism by a couple percentage points. The effect is not huge but has been shown to work
Medications
The single most effective method for losing weight, is to use a modern GLP-1 Agonist medication. Some of the most common such peptide medications are:
Retatrutide - currently in clinical trials, but so far shown to be highly effective.
Tirzepatide - loss of 15.0% to 20.9% of body weight at 72 week, more effective than semaglutide.
Semaglutide - 14.9% to -15.2% in flagship obesity trials
There are also many other medications such as Cagrilintide and Mazdutide, and it is an active area of research to make peptides that help lose weight faster, and with less lean muscle loss.
It can be difficult or expensive to obtain, but prices are going down, and there are potentially grey-market methods for obtaining these medications too, but these are less safe than buying pharmaceutical grade products.
This is a brief dump on some of the methods of weight loss that I know of and which seem to be most effective. There was more discussion in this post by Mesityl, and I recommend reading it.
In my next post, I will talk about potential factors that help make sure you lose fat in the correct places in your body as well.