This claim is hard to prove, but many people would admit that in the times of stress they eat more and grow fat easier.

Whether this is a purely psychological phenomenon, or a physiological as well, I do not know. It is possible that the brain associated stress with a possibility of starvation, and wants to store more resources for future contingencies, so we feel more hungry, and it is also possible that stress produces some involuntary gene expression, which helps storing more fat.

In any case, limiting stress is certainly beneficial to a decent weight.

Of course, “limiting stress” is easier said than done, but there are certain measures that can be undertaken even when some external pressures will not abate by themselves.

1. Sleep more. Yes, this is very banal, but sleeping is equivalent to eating for the brain, to a degree. Everybody’s sleeping requirements are different, but about 9 hours is usually a good guess. It is believed that sleeping hours is better than other numbers. That is, sleeping for 6 hours is better than for 7 hours. Most of us dedicate 8 hours, so the advice of this HOWTO is to try sleeping for 9 hours instead.
2. Go to bed early. After all, it does not really matter when you sleep, so I recommend going to bed right after sunset, as this is the most natural to the body clock. This also means that you will have some quiet time in the morning, when no cars are running, and the city is quiet. Also, going to bed right after you get off work has a nice benefit of resting right after getting tired, so your best relaxed hours (in the morning) are spent on your tasks, not your boss’ tasks.
3. Go for a walk. Walking is a good thing, it pumps lymph in your body, as lymph does not have any other pump. Lymphatic system does not have a heart. Finding time for a walk is usually a bit hard, but I just managed to have a walk while going to work. Just get off one metro station earlier or later, and walk to your office building.
4. Plan some time to relax. This seem banal, but the point of planning rest is that you can actually plan high quality rest rather than follow your bodily instincts in just grabbing whatever entertainment is available at hand, rather than using high-quality entertainment planned in advance. Yest, entertainment can also be high and low quality! Reading books is usually better than binge-watching Douyin. Going for a day trip on a weekend is usually better than playing computer games for 40 hours in a row.

The above measures will not lead to a measurable weight loss, but they will make keeping a diet easier.

In order to lose weight, it is necessary to eat less. Everyone sort of knows this maxim, but, judging by my conversations with people who tried to lose weight like I did, many people do not understand what they are doing.

Firstly, many people seem to believe that it is enough to count the amount of calories you eat.

While this might work for some people, I found that it does not work for me.

You see, people do not eat energy, people eat food, and food is measured in grams (or kilograms). While it is possible to find an amount of energy equivalent to consuming a certain amount of food, most of these calculations are highly dependent on the bodily efficiency of each particular individual, so I am finding most of them dubious.

What is, on the other hand, possible to calculate is the amount of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins consumed. Of course, this calculation is also approximate, as not all carbs, fats and proteins are equal, but at least they bear some resemblance to reality and do not rely of dubious formulas.

Moreover, the law of conservation of mass is much easier to grasp for a human than the law of conservation of energy, and unless nuclear reactions are involved (and they are not), it is good enough: if you consume less materials than your body uses and discards, after a consumption cycle (about a day or a few), you will have to weigh less than before, that’s just it.

(CFP is “carbs, fats, proteins”.)

This section is very subjective, but there are “overall numbers”, which seem to be good enough for most people.

Firstly, you need to find your normal body weight.

This is not easy, as everyone is different, men and women are different, and among even men and women of equal height, bone density and diameter differ, but the good thing is that this only needs to be done once for your body.

Okay, theoretically not once. The number is going to change if you regularly go to the gym and purposefully work on increasing your muscular mass. If you do, refer to your trainer and medical doctor tracking your progress, this HOWTO is not for you.

For the people who want to develop the program once, follow it forever, and forget the formulas, finding a proper weight should work. I cannot tell you a correct formula, your have to find it yourself, but there are plenty.

After you have found your desired weight, you need to find out the daily amount of CFP needed to maintain the normal weight, per kilogram of desired body weight:

1. Carbohydrates :: 4 grams
2. Fats :: 1 gram
3. Proteins :: 1+ gram

Let us have a look at a person who weighs 60 kg (something between a man and a woman):

240g of carbs, 60g of fat, 60g of protein.

These numbers are intended to contribute to total consumption of the body, which primarily consists of two channels:

1. Repairs
2. Energy

Now, in principle, all three resources are used used for both channels, the body needs all CFP to build from, and it can also “burn” all three CFP to produce energy. This is not too important, but carbs are transformed into ATP, fats are turned into ketone bodies, and proteins … I don’t know, but in any case, burning proteins is a very bad idea and a sign of your body malfunctioning to a large degree.

In practice, though, the body will most naturally use the resources for repairs with higher priority than for energy. After all, human body can be remarkably efficient at turning stuff into energy, but building … not so much, otherwise we would have all been bodybuilders.

Even if you eat just the amount of resources above, you will be already losing weight, because this is a bare minimum needed to maintain the desired weight, so there will be a delta between what the current body weight would need and the target body. You will be losing weight very slowly, but for many people that is enough.

Now, the first disillusionment maxim: Losing weight is a process which cannot be finished. Indeed, after you have found a correct amount of food, you have to use it until the end of your life, because, guess what, you will not grow up any more, your body is a now a closed system and whatever comes in has to come out or stay.

Eventually, after you have reached your desired body weight, it is best to keep the amount of food just equivalent to the recommended intake of CFP.

Okay, fine, if you want to lose weight faster, you can reduce the numbers mentioned in the previous section further. Further, but not that further.

Okay, there is a way to lose weight very fast, it is called “fasting”. Basically this means that you stop eating completely and only drink water. Very soon (in a few days), your digestive system will deactivate and your will stop feeling hungry, unless you see food.

You can fast for a week, or even longer, not eating any food, and losing weight very quickly. I am not sure how quickly, but in any case I do not recommend doing that at all.

While it is not that unhealthy as many people believe (in fact, dangerous effects from starvation would only appear after about … well, more than a week), it is also practically useless. You will lose weight fast, but you will also gain weight very fast after resuming eating, and you would have to follow the “correct CFP” diet after fasting anyway, so the “fasting streak” will not give you much.

However, you can reduce the amount of CFP below the bare minimum, and it will make you lose weight faster, even though not that faster.

What can you cut?

Practically speaking, the only resource you can really cut from the above numbers is carbs. Unfortunately, as I said, not all fats and proteins are equal. Some fats that are stored into your body cannot be used for construction, you have to eat some external fats, and the body cannot really store proteins at all, you need to eat them every day.

But cutting carbs is much possible. If you eat, say, 120g of carbs per day, no problem, the body will break down more fats to compensate for energy loss, which is more or less what you need, because most of the “bad weight” consists of fat.

Cutting fat… well, it not that recommended. I guess (do not trust my word), that it is fairly safe to go from 60g to 30g of fat, but I cannot prove it, talk to your doctor.

Again, do not overdo it.

The second disillusioning sad story: you will feel hungry.

Unfortunately, feeling hungry is natural for adults. This is one of the eye-opening realisations of how adults differ from children. Children can eat and feel full, and it is normal for them, most of the things they eat will turn into growth.

Adults cannot. Moreover, millennia of evolution produced in human adults a feeling of hunger which exceeds the amount needed to just consume the CFP needed to maintain normal weight.

This is where “semaglutide” is trying to intervene, by reducing this sense of hunger in adults. But this HOWTO is not about semaglutide, because I managed to successfully lose weight without it.

How do you find a correct composition of your diet?

CFP is often written on the back of the packs of food you are buying, or it is possible to search for it online.

For example, Coke has 16g of carbs per 100 ml. An American can of Coke has 240 ml, so about 40 grams of carbs.

Assuming that you eat three times a day, you have about 80 grams of carbs budget per meal. And half of that budget is a can of Coke. Can you really satisfy a half of your hunger with a can of Coke? Come on.

Now let us look at things we used to eat “normally” in the past. After the WW2, the Soviet government provided veterans with a “bread allowance” of 600 grams of bread per day (about one “bukhanka”). Russian bread has 48 grams of carbs per 100 grams of bread, which makes it 288 grams of carbs per day. This is already more than the recommended amount! And that is without any other food, such as gruel or meat, which is required for protein intake.

(Of course, the Soviet union after the WW2 was not at all rich. The bread allowance was divided between all family members, and meat was such a scarcity that even mentioning it seems like a cruel joke, and, of course, they needed to do much more physical work, but our understanding of what is “normal to eat” comes from those times.)

So, basically, you can forget about both Coke and bread.

Well, it sort of depends on your stomach volume and natural hunger levels. Some people feel so full after a single slice (25g) of bread that they do not need anything else for the rest of the day. The allowance of 240/60/60, in fact, even gives some permission to eat a birthday cake slice once in a while.

Let us look at a birthday cake CFP: 40/17/6. That is not that worse than bread actually. If a typical slice is 200 grams, you are getting about half of your daily fat from it and a third of carbs. This is not an overwhelming number, and, in theory, you can even eat a slice every day, and still lose weight, if all the other food you consume is very-very low-carbs low-fat. But for me, a slice of cheesecake makes me very hungry, so having a diet of cheesecakes is impractical.

By all means, go and read through your favourite nutritional information website and look and find you best diet. You do not have to follow my advice below.

But my desire is to feel as little hunger as possible given my (male, fairly tall) size, so I want to eat large volumes, and I am blessed by the nature of not being a gourmand, so I can eat what other people consider to be boring.

Which means that the food I am allowing myself to eat actually boils down to the following, very meagre list:

1. Carbs
   1. Cabbage :: 2/0/1 (all sorts of it, including cauliflower and broccoli)
   2. Cucumber :: 3/0/1
   3. Tomato :: 4/0/1
   4. Courgette :: 4/0/1
2. Proteins
   1. Chicken breast :: 1/4/31
   2. Prawns/Shrimp :: 1/1/20
   3. Horse meat :: 1/5/40
3. Desserts
   1. Egg :: 1/10/13
   2. Onion :: 10/0/1
   3. Garlic :: 3/0/1
4. Milk :: 5/3/3
5. Tea, Coffee :: 0
6. Sparkling soda :: 0
7. Cooking oil :: 0/0/99
8. Tomato sauce, Mayonnaise, Mustard :: 15/50/2

Even if you cut your carbs intake to 60g per day, you can still eat 3000 grams of cabbage, which is more than enough to not feel hungry any more. (3000 grams is still not infinity.)

Protein is not that detrimental to weight loss. The body is not very likely to turn it into fat (although overdoing proteins can have other negative effects), the limiting factor for chicken breast is fat. 60/4 = 15, which makes it about 1500 grams of chicken breast per day. Again, defeating hunger with 1500 grams of chicken breast and 3000 grams of cabbage is quite possible.

The biggest contributors to fat are, surprisingly, sauce and eggs. Eggs have a lot other, non CFP elements, such as vitamins, so eating an egg per day is probably worth it, but and egg becomes a dessert. Eating cabbage and chicken breast without sauce is tiresome, so I allow myself a spoon of it, 15g, which is already 7 grams of fat.

So, to sum up, I am usually eating once a day, a meal of about the following:

1. Roasted or boiled cabbage, 1kg :: 40/0/10
2. Roasted chicken breast, 500g :: 5/20/150
3. Garlic 50g :: 5/0/1
4. Cooking oil, 15g :: 0/15/0
5. Sauce :: 0/7/0
6. Coffee with milk 500ml :: 10/6/6

55/50/170

How do I measure those weights so precisely? Well, I bought kitchen scales which are ridiculously easy to use and check my components before cooking.

I am also drinking a lot of decaf coffee and tea, and pure water, and sometimes eating a cucumber or a tomato.

In total: 60/60/170

I would also like to say a few words about desserts and candy.

As can be seen from the “menu”, onion, garlic, and eggs end up being desserts in this program, rather than being normal food. This is not as bad as it sounds, after a couple of weeks of a cabbage diet, garlic and onion start tasting really sweet, but in any case, they are spicy, and it is hard to eat a lot of them (I only eat them raw and juicy).

Tea, coffee, and soda water are listed in the “menu”, even though their CFP value is close to zero. They are a huge help in combating hunger during the day. Warm coffee with milk is just excellent at reducing hunger, and tens of different soda flavours, seemingly identical, really start tasting really different after some time, and you can drink as many of them as you want.

It is very helpful to eat regularly, mostly because it makes monitoring progress very more consistent, because you body has the same weight in the same hours of the day, therefore measurements are “of the same entity”, comparing apples to apples.

Measurements are very important to understand whether you are doing into a correct direction, and to increase the feeling of success. (A popular maxim says “if you want to achieve a goal, first you need to measure it”.)

As I mentioned above, I eat solid food once a day, but I drink a lot of decaf coffee during the day, which is very helpful to not feel hungry.

Contrary to popular belief, it does not really matter if you eat in the evening or during the night, it seems to take about 3 days to incorporate the materials consumed into your body.

So I eat before going to sleep, because when feeling full, falling asleep is much easier than when hungry.

I am measuring my weight once a day, in the morning, when the water drunk and anything eaten not according to the schedule cannot affect the measurement.

(Be aware that any material going through the digestive tract cannot take any of your body weight away. The actual molecules which are leaving your body and are leaving through one of the three channels:

1. urinary tract
2. sweating
3. breathing out CO₂)

I am writing down the results on paper, but in the past I used to just write them on the bathroom mirror with a marker, since I have my scales there and I can measure my weight without clothing without disturbing anyone with an unsightly show.

With such a schedule, it is possible to achieve weight loss speed of about 1.5 kg per week. Do not try to exceed this speed, it is not healthy. 1.5 kg per week is a solid observable number, which brings a lot of joy, helping to maintain the schedule.

Suppose you want to lower your weight from 90 kilograms to 60 kilograms (a short, but very overweight man). It would not be healthy to do this in less that 20 weeks, but in about half a year this should be doable.

On the other hand, I cannot vouch for the fact that the above observations will be applicable to women mutatis mutandis, because body fat plays a larger role in female metabolism than in male metabolism. Fat is actually producing some female hormones, so its percentage in a female body is naturally higher, so, firstly, probably females need to consume more fat than men, and are probably not expected to reach 1.5 kg per week weight loss.

Some of this weight loss will be muscular weight, unfortunately, this cannot be avoided. Losing fat is inevitably accompanied by losing muscles too. But for me this has never been much of a concern, I am not doing a lot of physical work.

Exercising can possibly make muscular loss less prominent.

But in any case, it is very nice to have a table with the number “how my body weight goes down”. On some days it will actually go up, do not expect your weight to decrease by 200 grams every day, but on average it should be possible.

Eat a lot of food from the list above.

Instead of eating a 1 kilogram of cabbage, eat 3. If 500 grams of chicken do not satisfy you – add up 500 more grams of shrimp. If even that fails, add 500 more grams of horse meat.

Most of the time when we are DESPERATELY HUNGRY, the desire can be squelched by variety better than by a sheer amount. The list above, no matter how meagre, still gives you some slack in choosing food.

Well, maintaining a constant weight is, in some sense even harder than losing weight.

Now you have to care not just about the KPI going up, but also about it going down unduly.

So, if while “losing weight” you only have to care about “not exceeding” the value plus tolerance, now you also have to care about not cutting too much.

This is also the time when the rough target of 240/60/60 stops being valid, because you really need to be “within a reasonable margin” of your bare minimum.

But at least you can congratulate yourself with an achievement.

You would probably want to switch to eating twice a day, not once. Which will also make measuring your weight harder, but it is probably possible to measure the weight twice a day, before each meal. This is actually much worse than measuring once, in the morning, but better than nothing. You can probably use “smart scales”, as writing down twice-a-day measurements is tiresome.

Overall, 240 grams of carbs allows a variety much larger than 60, but I generally like increasing amount, not increasing variety. As I said, I am not a gourmand.