Fat loss tips that work

The tips that work all do one of three things: help you eat less without being hungry, keep your muscle while you lose, or show you the real trend. Here they are by topic, each with the study behind it. Pick two or three, not all of them.

Lists of tips go wrong two ways. Some promise effects nobody has shown. Others are true but tiny, and crowd out the few that matter. Small habits work like compound interest: each one is modest, and they build on each other over months.

Food

• Put protein first at every meal. In a 2016 trial, men on a hard diet with high protein gained lean mass and lost more fat than men on half the protein.
• Start with vegetables or a salad. A low-calorie salad before lunch cut the calories eaten at the meal by 7 to 12%.
• Eat food that still looks like it grew. On an ultra-processed diet, people ate about 500 more calories a day without trying.
• Eat more fiber: beans, oats, berries, vegetables. In a 6-month study of dieters, fiber predicted weight loss better than anything else.
• Don’t fear potatoes. Boiled potatoes kept people fuller than any of 38 common foods, calorie for calorie.
• Drink two cups of water before meals. In a 12-week trial of older adults on a diet, it added about 4 pounds (2 kg) of loss.
• Log everything for two weeks, weekends too. People who were sure they ate very little had underreported their food by 47%.

Movement

• Lift two or three days a week. Across 62 trials, dieting alone cost lean mass, and adding weight training kept it.
• Walk every day. Everyday movement outside the gym varies hugely between people, and in a 1999 study it predicted who stayed lean when overfed.
• Pick the cardio you’ll do. Intervals and steady cardio took off the same fat, and intervals took about 40% less time.
• Don’t eat back your watch calories. Very active people burn less extra than you’d guess, because the body cuts back elsewhere.

Sleep

• Protect your sleep while you diet. On 5.5 hours in bed, dieters lost the same weight as on 8.5 hours, but 55% less of it was fat.
• Get an extra hour. Adults who slept about 1.2 hours more a night ate about 270 fewer calories a day.
• Close the kitchen after dinner. Eating late made people hungrier in a tightly controlled study.

The scale

• Weigh every morning, after the bathroom and before food. In a 6-month trial, daily weighing with feedback lost 6.6% of weight against 0.4%.
• Judge the weekly average, not the day. Each gram of stored carbs holds at least 3 grams of water, so a carb-heavy day shows up as a gain that isn’t fat.
• Expect a bump around your period. Fluid retention peaked on the first day of flow in a year-long study of 62 women.
• Treat the bodyfat number as a trend. Home scales missed by several points in a lab test but tracked change better.
• Tape your waist once a month. Over 40 inches for men or 35 for women raises the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

Gyroscope logs your weight and bodyfat from a Withings or any Apple Health scale on its own, free on any plan.

Eating out

• Assume a restaurant meal is a big one. Meals from US restaurants averaged about 1,205 calories, and 92% held more than a person needs at one sitting.
• Order protein and vegetables first, then add the rest.
• Box half before you start if the plate is big.
• Pick your drink number before you go. A 12 oz beer has about 150 calories and a 5 oz glass of wine about 120.
• Plan the weekend. In a year-long trial, people cutting calories lost weight on weekdays and stopped on weekends.