After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight
I managed to lose 40 pounds last year, using intermittent fasting. That impressed people, but what&#x27;s impressed me is how easy it was to keep it off. I expected to have to do a lot more work than I have, I really seemed to have found a new &#x27;set point&#x27;, where I can simply let my body self-regulate eating and I won&#x27;t gain weight. Sometimes it even goes down.<p>I think a person&#x27;s state of mind plays a huge role. I used IF because it seemed the easiest way to incorporate a sustained caloric deficit into my lifestyle. The knob of &quot;how many times a day I&#x27;m eating&quot; was far easier to tweak than &quot;what I&#x27;m eating&quot; or &quot;how much I eat when I&#x27;m eating.&quot; I&#x27;m just really fucking lazy and found that over time, skipping meals works with my laziness.<p>With IF, I can eat what I want, as much as I want, just only once a day. I used to be really strict about once a day, now I&#x27;ll have a snack here and there, sometimes I&#x27;ll even have what amounts to a light meal outside of my main one. Getting adjusted was a pain, but I&#x27;d alleviate it by eating small amounts outside of the &#x27;window&#x27; and trust that I&#x27;d cheat less over time. Which I more or less did.<p>Ultimately I feel it&#x27;s not really worth it to try to fight your body too hard. If your system perceives a shock, it will defend itself. But humans seem hard-wired for big, dramatic gestures, and so they&#x27;ll do grievous damage to their metabolic systems like crash dieting simply because they can&#x27;t trust themselves to maintain a safer, more sustainable course of action like simply &quot;eating less and exercising more.&quot; I think a lot of people think of the idea of &quot;sustained lifestyle change&quot; and balk. Like they can never eat ice cream again or something.