I Was Obese. Here's The Food Advice That Keeps Me Sane

Ten food lessons I learned the hard way.

I maxed out at 220 pounds when I was younger, pushing me into the obese BMI range. I lost 62 pounds before beginning to pile on muscle, and have kept a “normal” BMI for more than twenty years.

I didn’t discover a quick fix or one crazy trick they don’t want you to know. Maintaining my weight takes effort, and I’ve relearned the same lessons repeatedly. When I’m at my leanest — when everything feels low-effort — I begin to think I’m above what I’ve learned, that I’ve escaped myself. That’s when the slippery slope of backsliding begins.

I’m seven pounds above my normal weight, so last night I sat down for a conversation with myself before things got further out of hand. This meant journaling like a philosopher to remind myself what’s what.

I’ll summarize the fruit of that conversation in the hopes that it helps others who wrestle with moderate, sane eating.

One: Genetics Is Not Destiny:

Genes matter, but they don’t dictate your destiny¹.

Researchers once locked up 24 people for 100 days to limit their activity and overfed each by 1,000 calories, six days a week. They all got fatter, but the weight gain ranged from 9 pounds to 29 pounds. The subjects were identical twins that shared genes, and the variation in weight gain between twins was a third less than between genetically unrelated subjects². We see the same correlation in weight loss when identical twins exercise³.

Similarly, we vary quite a bit in how enticing we find highly palatable processed foods, and how much we’ll overeat them.

My suggestion: Stop moping and get on with it. Genetics are not destiny. Anyone can lose weight, and keeping it off is possible. That it takes more effort isn’t, in the end, a deal breaker. No credible evidence points to any humans being unable to remain lean.

Two: Sleep Before Food

If food is the king of weight management, sleep is the queen.

Sleep deprivation and unstable circadian rhythms make maintaining a healthy weight very challenging⁴. Seven or Eight hours of sleep is probably best, but I personally find sleep deprivation less of an issue than circadian drift. One of my life-long problems is that unless I’m on top of sleep hygiene, I begin waking at 3 a.m., unable to fall back asleep. After a few sleepless nights I’m so ravenous moderation isn’t an option — like I don’t decide to shovel food in my mouth, but rather the food decides I will shovel it.

So before any discussion of food choice, we need to start with prioritizing sleep and sleep hygiene. Anything else puts the cart before the horse.

Three: Exercise, But Don’t Fool Yourself

I exercise consistently, but trying to radically increase caloric burn by exercising more isn’t a strategy that’s ever born fruit for me. Diet and exercise usually produce better results than just one or the other⁵, but few people can exercise their way out of a bad diet.

I find carrying more muscle mass to be helpful in weight maintenance, likely because muscle mass burns calories. To increase muscle mass you need to do some form of strength training.

Four: Dopamine Reset

Until I read The Pleasure Trap many years ago, I was skeptical that anyone could be “addicted” to processed sugar and salt — particularly salt, which seemed innocuous, ubiquitous, and unavoidable.

Addiction is an overused word, but I’ve been forced to recognize how inexplicably bad I am at supervising my consumption of sugary and salty foods. If I’m hungry and you drop a huge, overflowing plate of healthy whole food before me without salt, I will stop eating when my body is satiated. Food will remain on the plate when I leave the table.

If I eat the same food with lots of salt and sugar in the form of tasty sauce, I’m often unable to tell when I’m satisfied. The signal doesn’t reach me. I’ll plow through until the plate is empty, only later feeling overstuffed, yet still needing more. It becomes a battle of willpower, and I often lose. I find this lack of self-regulation ability baffling given the rest of my life, but “try harder,” never fixes the problem.

When I go without sugar and salt for a few days, it’s like a fever breaks. I feel calm and almost disinterested as I eat. It’s magic.

I try to eat 3/4ths of my meals with no salt and sweeteners. When I do eat them, I can limit the damage by bookending enticing meals with blander meals. This is probably because my stomach shrinks from eating smaller volumes, which puts a ceiling on consumption.

Experiment: Many people can eat salt and sugar moderately. See if you’re one of them. It’s an interesting experiment to eat no salt or sweeteners for a week, which also means none of the salty processed/premade/canned foods you buy at the grocery store. See if it changes your subjective or objective eating experience.

Five: Glycemic Index Only Matters To A Point

Foods highest in glycemic index and load — measurements of blood sugar changes — are also the most processed. Think sugar, flour, and everything they go into. Although there’s a correlation between heavily processed food consumption and weight gain, many studies have failed to correlate low glycemic index diets more broadly with more weight loss⁶.

Plain boiled white potatoes in their skins and without toppings are high glycemic foods, but I find them among the most satiating, filling me up for hours. Indeed, white potatoes top out this satiety index⁷. So yeah, avoid heavily processed food because you’ll eat too much of it, but you don’t need to avoid whole foods with a high glycemic index.

Six: Water Matters

Try an experiment: Make yourself lunch or dinner from 700 calories of unsweetened whole wheat bread (277 grams) on one day and then 700 calories of unsweetened whole wheat Cream of Wheat the next (7.78 cups, cooked). If salt is in the bread, put an equal amount of salt in the cream of wheat.

When you’re done eating each meal, weigh the remainder and figure out how many calories you didn’t eat by computing in cronometer. You’ll probably eat way more calories from bread. Maybe you’ll finish the bread entirely. Both foods are made from whole wheat, so the difference was primarily water, which dilutes carbohydrate flavor intensity and adds bulk.

Similarly, I can demolish a bag of dried apples, but I’m probably not going to eat more than one fresh apple.

Water can also be added as a food “supplement” to increase satiety. Drinking two cups to water before a meal caused a 13% reduction in calorie consumption⁸, so I try to start my meal with water and sip more during it, which makes a big impact.

Seven: Veggies Matter

Similarly, you can “inject” water into meals by adding lots of high-water, low-calorie, nonstarchy or leafy vegetables. They can be mixed in or eaten on the side, but if you add a high-calorie topping you’ll undo the effect.

When researchers fed subjects a pasta meal, they ate roughly 900 calories. But when they fed them the same meal with a 100-calorie salad appetizer consisting of lettuce, carrots, cherry tomatoes, celery, and cucumber, they ate 200 calories less of the pasta. More food consumed, but fewer calories. However, when participants were fed high-calorie salads with dressings and other high-calorie toppings like cheese, they consumed more calories than the pasta-only group⁹.

Eight: Protein Matters:

Protein intake matters when it comes to losing fat and maintaining muscle mass while you shed fat. It’s made a big difference for me.

When obese participants ate unlimited portions of high (25% of calories) or low (12% of calories) protein food with fat stuck at 30% of calories for each group, those in the high-protein group lost roughly double the weight¹⁰.

Even in normal-weight adults, unlimited intake of a high-protein diet (30% of calories) can cause body fat loss, appetite suppression, and reductions in calorie intake¹¹.

1.2 — 1.6 grams of protein per kg of weight is probably a good target to shoot for, or 20-30% of calories.

Whether you’re getting this through beans and tofu, animal protein, or supplements, find a way to get it in.

Nine: Don’t Forget Fat

Since there’s a staggering 120 calories in a tiny tablespoon of oil (more than in an apple), and all fatty foods are calorically dense, it can be tempting to eat a very low-fat diet to accelerate weight loss.

My experience is that dipping below 20% of calories from fat is a big mistake. The consequences are dry skin, low libido, and a weird mood funks.

But oil is very easy to overconsume. I prefer limited servings of nuts, seeds, and avocados, but I do eat some olive oil.

Ten: No Snacks

You get either two or three meals each day. There is no snacking. Seek to feel mildly hungry between meals, but not ravenous. Each additional “eating occasion,” drives up energy intake beyond what you’d consume if you ate fewer meals¹².

Intermittent fasting does not increase weight loss over other diets when calories are equated¹³, though many people find IF brings about a psychological advantage, and it’s a valid way to lose weight.

Choose Your Own Adventure

This advice isn’t suitable for everyone¹⁴.

I’ve read many diet and health books over the years, and looked at many weight-loss studies. Most of the gimmicky diet gurus struggle to differentiate themselves in the market, and that’s why we have so much fluff. They sell magic workarounds that don’t have much basis in the scientific literature. At the end of the day, we’re looking to eat fewer calories without feeling ravenous while maintaining muscle mass. Everything needs to serve that goal. If it doesn’t, it’s just a pretty bow on top of the package with no utility but plenty of identitarian creds, which we know doesn’t work well for humans.

As is often the case, I’ll fade out with Socrates. Xenophon tells us Socrates instructed students to, “study their own constitutions throughout life to see what food or drink or what kind of exercise was good for them individually, and by what use of these they could live the healthiest lives. He said that anyone who observed himself in this way would find it hard to discover a doctor who could recognize what was good for his health better than he could himself.”

Know thyself, my friends. Good luck!

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Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.

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1. Friedman JM. A war on obesity, not the obese. Science. 2003 Feb 7

2. Bouchard, Claude. Et al. The Response to Long-Term Overfeeding in Identical Twins. N Engl J Med 1990;322:1477-1482

3. Bouchard, Claude, et al. The response to exercise with constant energy intake in identical twins. Obes Res 1994 Sep;2(5):400-10. doi: 10.1002/j.1550-8528.1994.tb00087.x.

4. Papatriantafyllou E, et al. Sleep Deprivation: Effects on Weight Loss and Weight Loss Maintenance. Nutrients. 2022 Apr 8;14(8):1549.

5. Eglseer, Doris. Et Al. Nutrition and Exercise Interventions to Improve Body Composition for Persons with Overweight or Obesity Near Retirement Age: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials. Review Adv Nutr 2023 May;14(3):516-538.

6. Chekima, K. Et al. Low glycaemic index or low glycaemic load diets for people with overweight or obesity. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2023 Jun 22;6(6):CD005105. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD005105.pub3. PMID: 37345841; PMCID: PMC10313499.

7. Holt. SH. Et al. A Satiety Index of Common Foods. Eur J Clin Nutr .1995 Sep;49(9):675-90.

8. Davy, et al. Water consumption reduces energy intake at a breakfast meal in obese older adults. J Am Diet Assoc. 2008 Jul;108(7):1236-9. doi: 10.1016/j.jada.2008.04.013. PMID: 18589036; PMCID: PMC2743119.

9. Rolls BJ, et al. Salad and satiety: energy density and portion size of a first-course salad affect energy intake at lunch. J Am Diet Assoc. 2004 Oct;104(10):1570-6

10. Skov, A. et al. Randomized trial on protein vs carbohydrate in ad libitum fat reduced diet for the treatment of obesity. Int J Obes 23, 528–536 (1999).

11. David S Weigle, et al. A high-protein diet induces sustained reductions in appetite, ad libitum caloric intake, and body weight despite compensatory changes in diurnal plasma leptin and ghrelin concentrations. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 82, Issue 1, 2005,

12. Duffey KJ, et a. Energy density, portion size, and eating occasions: contributions to increased energy intake in the United States, 1977-2006. PLoS Med. 2011 Jun;8(6):e1001050.

13. Maruthur NM, et al. Effect of Isocaloric, Time-Restricted Eating on Body Weight in Adults With Obesity : A Randomized Controlled Trial. Ann Intern Med. 2024 May;177(5):549-558. doi: 10.7326/M23-3132. Epub 2024 Apr 19. PMID: 38639542.

14. My brother and mother eat as much as they like of whatever they want without weight gain. My mom — already effortlessly lean — once went to a health retreat where they served unlimited portions of bland, healthy food. She became underweight, and it took her the better part of a year to return to the normal BMI range. My girlfriend is much the same. If the food isn’t incredibly enticing she just can’t be bothered to eat, and there isn’t a spare ounce of fat on her. The disparity is infuriating, but such is life and genetics. I took after my father, who was always overweight. If I want a different outcome than him, I need to act differently.