Ultraprocessed Foods – A New Theory of Obesity

I’ve been fascinated by the fact that I know several people who have become vegan, lost weight, and feel better. But I also know many people who have gone low carb, or even eat nothing but meat, and are also losing weight and report feeling much better. I’ve been wondering what they both share in common, and suspected that both forms of dietary restriction mean cutting out most hyper palatable ultraprocessed foods.<p>It’s an interesting article, I hope to see more research on the subject.

Why is whole milk considered ultraprocessed and skim milk considered unprocessed? Whole milk is literally what you would get if you didn&#x27;t process milk.<p>Why are canned corn and green beans ultraprocessed? They contain nothing but corn&#x2F;beans and a touch of salt. If the salt is the problem, why do the unprocessed meals have added salt?<p>It looks like for the unprocessed meals, they chose a bunch of high in vegetables and whole grains, high fiber meals and chose a bunch of high calorie foods for the ultraprocessed meals [1]. No surprise people ate more calories when given the high calorie foods.<p>They say &quot;dietitians scrupulously matched the ultraprocessed and processed meals for calories&quot;, but also that people were told to each as much as they like. What does that even mean? The calories can only be the same if you fix the quantity.<p>They don&#x27;t define &quot;ultraprocessed&quot; or provide any mechanism for weight gain that would apply to their very varied selection of &quot;ultraprocessed&quot; foods.<p>The term &quot;processed&quot; is used to scare people about food, but the term is so broad that there can&#x27;t possibly be a single mechanism by which various processed food would be unhealthy. Processing includes cutting, grinding, heating, cooking, mixing, adding ingredients, drying, deboning... basically anything you do to food. It&#x27;s one thing to say a specific process, like adding sodium nitrite, is harmful. Making a blanket statement that all cutting, cooking and combining of foods is bad should raise a bit more skepticism.<p>If the article has a more specific definition of processed, they should mention it because their choices seem pretty arbitrary.<p>[1] Study meals: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cell.com&#x2F;cms&#x2F;10.1016&#x2F;j.cmet.2019.05.008&#x2F;attachment&#x2F;f7d43756-3f67-4557-8322-59a9d143d63c&#x2F;mmc1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cell.com&#x2F;cms&#x2F;10.1016&#x2F;j.cmet.2019.05.008&#x2F;attachme...</a>

One experiment [1] with rats, which made sense to me, went like this: Some rats got a lot of sugar and did not gain weight. Another group got a lot a fat and gained some weight. A third group got a 50:50 ratio of sugar and fat and gained a substantial amount of weight.<p>This is one of the reasons why some people (like me) can eat cake made of 50% sugar and butter nearly endlessly. It&#x27;s an unnatural combination and somehow transitions our brains into zombie mode where we never feel satiated.<p>For that reason you can find that combination in a lot of processed food...<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;biology.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;43673&#x2F;5050-sugar-fat-mixture" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;biology.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;43673&#x2F;5050-sugar...</a>

This seems to make a lot of sense, and removes that ridiculous notion that somehow removing a single element from our diet is what will lead to weight loss - the foods that people gain weights on are the foods that give us mixed signals to their quality and quantity of calories. It&#x27;s hard to not feel you&#x27;ve eaten a lot of calories roast beef when you&#x27;ve eaten a lot of roast beef, but it&#x27;s much easier to lose track of how many chips you&#x27;ve eaten, and harder to match that to the relative amount of calories consumed.

Lab animals are getting fatter too, even though they&#x27;re on a very controlled diet[1]. I think there is some factor we don&#x27;t understand yet.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;royalsocietypublishing.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1098&#x2F;rspb.2010.1890" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;royalsocietypublishing.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1098&#x2F;rspb.201...</a>

Unfortunately, there&#x27;s no clear definition of ultraprocessed. Like is factory-made whole wheat break ultraprocessed? Canned pinto beans? Artisan cheese? Factory cheese?

An interesting observation, but the description of how the effect might work was a bit hand-wavy.<p>A very precise and plausible explanation of the effect at the level of specific hormones released can be found here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbdnutrition.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;08&#x2F;the-perils-of-food-processing-how-the-preparation-of-food-affects-how-quickly-it-is-absorbed&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbdnutrition.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;08&#x2F;the-perils-of-food-p...</a><p>Another likely cause is that highly-processed foods often contain seed oils, which usually have high levels of linoleic acid. One of the effects of linoleic acid (amongst many others) is to increase appetite:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;30261617" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;30261617</a>

It seems like the typical &quot;macronutrient analysis&quot; does not provide a good metric for a food being &quot;ultraprocessed&quot; because in order to get the fat&#x2F;carbohydrate&#x2F;protein numbers, we essentially ultraprocess (in fact burn) the food while measuring it! Fat is extracted, protein is recorded by nitrogen content, and carbohydrates are counted by the weight difference in a calorimeter.<p>A few commenters have pointed to &quot;dietary fiber&quot; as that number on a food label which might warn of &quot;ultraprocessing&quot;. This is reasonably close because the definition of fiber is actually dependent on digestion. It might be important to remember that fiber is properly understood as a <i>metric</i>, i.e. &quot;indigestible fraction&quot;, rather than as a <i>substance</i> per se. For example, pureeing a piece of fruit reduces the satiety effect of consuming it:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S019566630800620X" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S019566630...</a><p>This is a rather simple and compelling demonstration that simple substance-content analysis does not tell you everything you need to know about what you&#x27;re eating.<p>TFA also comes close to explaining, in my opinion, the strange phenomenon with fad diets where they seem to work well for early adopters and not so well after they catch on. In the early stages of a fad diet, food manufacturers haven&#x27;t caught on, and dieters are forced to prepare food from scratch. In the later stages, you buy the frozen bag of &quot;paleo&quot; chicken nuggets from the freezer aisle or you unseal a quart of &quot;vegan&quot; milk in the morning when you have coffee. These products are not the same thing eaten by someone who cut up raw chicken and rolled it in cashew flour, or someone who blended their own almond-milk.

The mechanism is plausible and the preliminary studies seem suggestive, but I read the article and I still can&#x27;t tell you a workable definition of &quot;processed&quot;, nor what the mechanism is beyond &quot;artificial sweeteners screw with satiety&quot; and &quot;junk supermarket food is high in calories&quot;. The latter is clearly irrelevant since the studies referenced presumably keep caloric intake constant in an inpatient hospital setting. The former is a result I remember reading about as a teenager literally decades ago. So what is the article pitching?<p>What is &quot;processing&quot; and how does it contribute to confusing gut-brain signalling? The article lists kinds of food that we all agree are &quot;processed&quot;, but I have no idea why I think they&#x27;re &quot;processed&quot; the same way a dumb ML model might correctly classify something as a cow while having a nonsense mapping from feature space to outcome.<p>Not trolling. Can someone list a set of specific ingredients or techniques which are constituent of &quot;processing&quot;, and how these things are connected to the article&#x27;s mechanism? I am aware of past mixed research on artificial sweeteners and satiety, but clearly that&#x27;s both an older finding and a mixed one, so the article is alluding to something more that isn&#x27;t explained.

I&#x27;m curious how it is that the bag of flour and the box of pasta ended up in the &quot;unprocessed food&quot; photo, but the loaves of bread ended up in the &quot;processed food&quot; photo.

&gt; <i>Subjecting more people to the strict study regimen at this preliminary stage, Hall says, “would be unethical.”)</i><p>What? They aren&#x27;t being whacked with hammers or given electric shocks.<p>And, regarding &quot;more people&quot;, whatever is unethical for 500 people is unethical for 5.

<i>&quot;Sure, meal portions today are larger, food more abundant, and many of us are eating more calories than people did decades ago. But with temptations so plentiful, almost all Americans could be overeating—yet a good number do not. That, Hall thinks, is the real nutrition mystery: What factors, for some people, might be acting to override the body’s inborn satiety mechanisms that otherwise keep our eating in check?&quot;</i><p>1) everything they listed, 2) food tasting good &gt; &quot;my body is adequately satiated&quot;. This is not a mystery. We just don&#x27;t want to admit that our food is very tasty, we&#x27;re serving our people too much food, and that we have no self control.<p>The body may have an &quot;inborn satiety mechanism&quot;, but that doesn&#x27;t mean it rules our brain. My body sends me pain when I run too much and my knees hurt. Do I stop running? Not if running makes me feel good.

Would something like the Impossible Burger patty be considered ultraprocessed?

&gt; “I have the freedom to change my mind. Basically, I have the privilege to be persuaded by data.”<p>So this is considered a “privilege” among researchers and scientists in this day and age... It used to be what separated science from pseudoscience.

I would love to read the original publication. I&#x27;m curious if&#x2F;how they factored in the use of high fructose corn syrup which is known to suppress satiation response and is common is processed foods. Allas; the original paper is paywalled behind elsevier: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;31269427" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;31269427</a> You&#x27;d think that since it was publicly funded the public should be able to read it..<p>Edit: previous link was an erratum. Original:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;31105044" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;31105044</a>

&gt; Dietitians scrupulously matched the ultraprocessed and processed meals for calories, energy density, fat, carbohydrate, protein, sugars, sodium and fiber.<p>Hopefully they accounted for bioavailability of nutrients. The way I&#x27;ve seen this framed is you&#x27;ll get more energy from powdered rice than an equivalent amount of whole rice.

I think this method of actually measuring and cataloguing the food consumed instead of relying in a poll is the way forward.<p>We should repeat this kind of studies. This methodology should be encouraged.<p>I just have a small doubt about a particular point: it mentions &#x27;a very low carbohydrate ratio&#x27;.<p>But this is not clear at all.<p>Is 30% of carbohydrates very low? So far some studies actually claim this.<p>Is it 5% of carbohydrates, like the ketogenic diet proponents claim is necessary to be in a ketogenic state?<p>For me, the proportion of carbohydrates that can be considered very low actually makes too big a difference to not to dive further.

I think it&#x27;s more that ultra-processed foods typically have high amounts of sugars and carbs. Any diet where you remove sugar and carbs, you&#x27;ll see weight loss. Diabetics demonstrate that our relationship with food is much more complex than most people think - for example, diabetics don&#x27;t have to inject insulin if eating white cheddar cheese.<p>People should generally eat more protein in the form of meat, eggs, fish, nuts, cheese, etc. You feel fuller and with a little exercise you can quite easily turn it into muscle.

An important area on which a lot of nonsense is published. By some analyses over 80% nonsense. (When I look at the other material you often can&#x27;t take any action based on it anyway.)<p>Some interesting observations in these comments, much better than you usually see.<p>Could even kick off an HN diet study? Detailed recording of everything that can be sensibly noted, you pick the dietary changes and do it for a long, long time. Something like that might cut through the clutter?

There&#x27;s one aspect of this that&#x27;s very lazily written: what exactly they mean when they say people ate &quot;more&quot; food.<p>The big open question for me - and what I&#x27;ve long thought was one of the main contributors - is caloric density. Were these people eating roughly the same volume of food, which just happened to have more calories when ultraprocessed? Or is the density about the same, and they are actually consuming a larger volume?

But this begs the question for me, if you can count the calories of these ultraprocessed foods can they still contribute to a healthy lifestyle? I mean, let&#x27;s consider that I eat ultraprocessed all the time, but in my calorie range, so I don&#x27;t get obese; is it less healthy than for example vegan diet, or it doesn&#x27;t matter that much?

Would have been nice if they checked not only low-carb, but also a &quot;no-carb&quot; diet a.k.a. keto diet.

The multi-trillion dollar world ultraprocessed food industry is going to go into high gear to try to trick the public into believing that eating ultraprocessed foods is just fine and the fault for the obesity epidemic lies entirely elsewhere. In fact, I would say it is already doing it.

The obvious quick test to this question would be to look at countries where they have a lot less processed foods.<p>India as I understand has rising levels of obesity, yet their food seems a lot less processed than western diets - though someone may have more accurate information than me.

Apparently this is a picture of ultraprocessed foods: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;sciam&#x2F;assets&#x2F;Image&#x2F;2019&#x2F;scientificamerican1019-38-I3.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;sciam&#x2F;assets&#x2F;Image&#x2F;201...</a><p>This seems like nonsense. There&#x27;s baby formula in the top right corner: were they really feeding baby formula to grown adults in the lab trials?<p>Or did the authors of this piece just grab a bunch of foods from the grocery store and assumed they were related to the study?<p>I want a link to the actual study. Pictures like the above just piss me off. There&#x27;s a lot of issues in health-reporting and diet reporting. Lots of &quot;Ultraprocessed&quot; discussion going on, but there&#x27;s no definition of what &quot;ultraprocessed&quot; is.<p>--------<p>EDIT: Here&#x27;s the next photo:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;sciam&#x2F;assets&#x2F;Image&#x2F;2019&#x2F;scientificamerican1019-38-I4(1).jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;sciam&#x2F;assets&#x2F;Image&#x2F;201...</a><p>Are you seriously telling me that __canned peas__ are highly processed? That&#x27;s ridiculous. Especially in the face of highly-refined, enriched, white-flour in the &quot;unprocessed&quot; food picture.<p>Look: I get that Spam and frozen-pizza are &quot;ultraprocessed&quot; foods. But canned peas and Goya chickpeas are processed? Who made these photographs? They fed Spam to people in hospital, and these images are drawing conclusions about canned peas.<p>-------------<p>I think there&#x27;s something to be said about &quot;Spam is bad for you&quot; (actual study) vs &quot;We fed Spam to 20 people in a hospital for 2 weeks, and we&#x27;ve concluded that Frosted Flakes and canned peas are bad for you&quot;. Unfortunately, this article feels a lot like the latter conclusion.

It’s probably fiber? Is there any literature in the effect of fiber on satiety?

I don&#x27;t know why people concentrate on the amount of processing and de- and re-construction of food when it seems obvious that many foods are engineered to make them easy and compelling to consume in large quantities.<p>Ice cream is not heavily processed compared to the kind of protein bars that aspiring bodybuilders eat, but you can easily binge thousands of calories of ice cream in a single sitting. It&#x27;s not so easy to binge protein bars, despite companies doing their chemical best to make them taste like candy.<p>Or compare those protein bars to the sweet, easy-to-eat bars (can&#x27;t find brand names now) at Whole Foods that brag about having a small number of minimally processed ingredients. If you cram something full of honey or figs you can make it dangerously easy to feed your demons with while still being &quot;natural&quot; and &quot;minimally processed.&quot; You won&#x27;t see expensive bars sold to health-conscious well-off people implicated in the obesity epidemic, but that&#x27;s a matter of class, not nutrition.<p>Why bother obsessing over abstract, ill-defined distinctions like &quot;processed&quot; or &quot;ultraprocessed&quot; instead of teaching people to recognize that companies are systematically and scientifically exploiting our human weaknesses for profit and ruining our health in the process? Educate people to look at a Snickers bar, or a bar full of honey and dried fruit from their fru-fru grocery store, and see a cold, calculated, predatory attack. Food companies attack the weaknesses in our eating behavior the way a lion seeks out the neck of a wildebeest. The lion doesn&#x27;t specifically want the wildebeest to suffer and die; it just wants to eat its flesh. Likewise, Mars Inc. does not specifically want Americans to suffer from obesity and diabetes; it just wants to sell a lot of candy bars.<p>I suspect the obsession with these distinctions is motivated by the desire to find a positive story to address the obesity crisis with. Negative stories about food and eating are hard to sell to the public, who by and large (heh) just want to enjoy their food in an uncomplicated way. Not to mention that many people working in public health see them as a risk factor for eating disorders. Stigmatizing a category of food is a positive story because it promises us that once this subset of food is out of the picture, we can have an easy, healthy, uncomplicated relationship with food, without any need to address our own behavior. It locates the entire problem in a category of inanimate substances that can be purged from our world. It&#x27;s a much happier story than saying we have desires and tendencies that don&#x27;t always serve us, and that some of the most powerful forces in our society seem bent on making sure those desires and tendencies lead us to the worst possible place. But I suspect that eventually we&#x27;ll have to face up to that, like we did with the tobacco industry, except that we&#x27;ll have to accept the existence of the food industry and an indefinite, partly adversarial relationship with it.

Is it a new theory tho? There is a chapter about this topic in The 4-Hour Body (2010). And I&#x27;m pretty sure Tim Ferriss isn&#x27;t the author of the theory so it was known before this book.

Reading through most of the comments, a common theme for weight loss, seems to be cut out snacking in between meals and be mindful of what you eat (vegan or vegetarian or meat)

Is this study biased in the sense that people who cook for themselves are not represented? Does the hospital staff order everything in?

An important distinction in the article: It doesn&#x27;t say that you <i>gain more weight</i> by eating processed foods, but that eating processed foods <i>makes you want</i> to eat more. In other words, calories from processed foods are not more powerful weight gainers, the impact on obesity is related to how it effects satiety &amp; appetite.

Smaller portion size. Of any foods. Of course, I am not a scientist.

This is not new at all. Ultraprocessed foods are usually supplemented with oils that increase inflammation and cause a variety of health issues. The guy who opened me up to this is PD Mangan, who I found out about from Taleb.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Mangan150" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Mangan150</a><p>Let me dump some info though for more discussion.<p>A Western-like fat diet is sufficient to induce a gradual enhancement in fat mass over generations. This study used mice and bred them over 4 generations. Each generation became fatter than the previous one. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jlr.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;51&#x2F;8&#x2F;2352.full" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jlr.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;51&#x2F;8&#x2F;2352.full</a><p>What was the key element of this “Western-like fat diet”? A high ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids. The omega-6 is due to a high amount of linoleic acid, of which seed oils contain a large amount.<p>The results show that high-fat diets, when that fat is composed largely of linoleic acid, made mice fat and that epigenetic changes likely drove the increase in fat mass over generations.<p>Notably, at a time where overweightness and obesity have steadily increased over generations in most industrialized countries, consumption of LA and ARA has increased. In France, an increase of 250% and 230%, respectively, occurred from 1960 to 2000.<p>The consumption of large amounts of linoleic acid, mainly from seed oils, is something new in the world. Humans didn’t evolve eating that much, which is around 10-fold higher than dietary requirements.<p>Decreasing the linoleic acid content to 1% of the diet reversed the obesogenic property of the high-fat diet. Adding omega-3 fatty acids of the type in fish and fish oil also reversed the obesogenic properties of the diet. Excess linoleic acid induces inflammation, a key factor in chronic disease such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1038&#x2F;oby.2012.38" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlinelibrary.wiley.com&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1038&#x2F;oby.2012.38</a><p>The modern Western diet has been consumed in developed English speaking countries for the last 50 years, and is now gradually being adopted in Eastern and developing countries. These nutrition transitions are typified by an increased intake of high linoleic acid (LA) plant oils, due to their abundance and low price, resulting in an increase in the PUFA n-6:n-3 ratio. This increase in LA above what is estimated to be required is hypothesised to be implicated in the increased rates of obesity and other associated non-communicable diseases which occur following a transition to a modern Westernised diet. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.plos.org&#x2F;plosone&#x2F;article?id=10.1371&#x2F;journal.pone.0132672" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.plos.org&#x2F;plosone&#x2F;article?id=10.1371&#x2F;journal...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;269696521_A_high_fat_diet_rich_in_corn_oil_reduces_spontaneous_locomotor_activity_and_induces_insulin_resistance_in_mice" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;269696521_A_high_fa...</a><p>Soybean oil and other seed oils are in almost all ultra-processed foods. They might also be linked to the depression epidemic. Men in the highest tertile (third) of linoleic acid intake had more than double the risk of depression. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;19427349?dopt=Abstract" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;19427349?dopt=Abstract</a><p>We saw above that linoleic acid leads to fat accumulation and insulin resistance. People in the highest tertile of visceral fat had 6 times the risk of colorectal cancer as those in the lowest. Insulin resistance was associated with up to 4 times the risk. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;19837793" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;19837793</a><p>High waist circumference is associated with 2 to 3 times the risk of colorectal cancer. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;7847643" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;7847643</a><p>One of the worst ingredients found in ultra-processed food is seed oil. Soybean oil is the most common. Seed oils cause obesity and increase the risk of chronic disease, like cancer. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.aicr.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;13&#x2F;processed-foods-calories-and-nutrients-americans-alarming-diet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.aicr.org&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;13&#x2F;processed-foods-calories-an...</a><p>The average American eats more than half of calories as ultra-processed food. To stay lean and healthy, you must avoid the ultra-processed junk that passes for food among average people. Eat whole, minimally processed foods. Meat, fish, eggs, fermented dairy, non-starchy vegetables.

Under capitalism, food is produced to be sold in as great quantity as possible, and therefore is designed to be addicting by their producers, large and small. It is possible to design food production to be healthy instead of craving driven.

Sugar, now go away.

Taking in more calories than are used causes weight gain.<p>Using more calories than are consumed causes weight loss.<p>This is rudimentary physics, there are no new theories needed to explain it.

Vegan or Meat eater doesn&#x27;t matter. It is always the amount and type (processed or non-processed&#x2F;fresh) food that we consume is what makes an individual to gain or lose weight. I have reduced my weight without altering the type of food that I take with the following steps<p>1. Eat when you are hungry 2. Even when you are hungry, eat only a medium portion(your stomach can be half filled). 3. Reduce sugar in take (any form of sugar) 4. Include physical activities in your daily work &#x2F; home life. Walking via stairs, cycling or walking to work etc.. you don’t necessarily need to do any dedicated exercise routines (well if u have time, its good to do). 5. Do not consume food after 7 pm. ( can take small portion of regional fruit if you are really hungry). 6. Most importantly, get a good sleep (10pm to 5am). 7. Get rid of all the measuring apps that you have in your phone, fitness, calorie calculator.. these are useless. Every human is unique in their nature and each individual needs certain amount of energy to do a work(differs from individual to individual) .. so we cannot set a common standard (BMI ) for all.<p>Always have time to cook fresh food on daily basis. I am from southern part of India and its very easy here to get fresh fruits, veggies, meat on daily basis. Mostly importantly, we buy on daily means and cook for the day. We never carry&#x2F;food for the next day. Almost zero processed&#x2F;frozen food. I believe processed food are the root cause for most of the health related issue that we face now a days.