Eating Advice from a Skinny Guy
And someone who’s read some books
I find online and in books there’s a million bits of eating advice from professionals and health professionals, but I want to share what personally has helped to keep me thin over the years.
Not Always So Skinny
At the end of elementary school/ middle school, I wasn’t all that skinny. I wasn’t obese but certainly I was overweight, for a couple reasons (the same reasons almost everyone is not skinny):
- Diet
- Exercise
I didn’t have hormone issues either, though I’ll get to what you should do for that at the end. Going into puberty helped a lot with dropping weight, but I’ll talk about what I did to keep the pounds away for the last 15–20 years.
Diet
Diet advice works different for every person, but these are the things that worked the best for me.
Don’t force yourself to eat “healthy” foods that you hate
I think this one was pretty big for me. I loved eating salads but certain healthy food items were just nasty to me for a long time (like plain celery). Making yourself eat what you consider nasty, healthy foods is a quick path to the McDonald’s drive-through.
Don’t keep food in the house you love to chow down on
Oreos, Chips, Ice Cream. I don’t buy these things to keep in the house, and recommend you don’t either. They hijack our brains so we want to eat more (have you ever had just one Oreo? You have great self restraint if so… but then why are you eating Oreos?)
If you want to eat something unhealthy, make it yourself
I heard this advice in a daytime TV show once. He talked about how if you want French Fries, you should skip the frozen food section and instead head over to the produce section. Buy and slice your own potatoes. You can control the oil, the salt, and most of all, you are using as good a quality potato as you’re willing to buy.
I also find that when you make things yourself, you realize how labor intensive things are, and that they probably aren’t worth it 90% of the time. Like making a cake vs. buying a piece of cake from the store… no small task getting a cake to come out alright.
Find your healthy food item and make it a core part of your diet
I was a huge fan of salads for a long time. And Olive Oil and Vinegar. These low calorie, but eventually satisfying (I ate a lot of lettuce) salads were my healthy food item. I ate them every day at some points in my life, and part of being skinny is finding something you love to eat that’s not all that bad for you.
My “healthy” dessert choice is dark chocolate. I used to dislike it quite a bit, but read a book about how you should enjoy the texture/ experience of chocolate eating and got myself some decent quality dark chocolate. It’s high in fat, but fat’s not the enemy as much as calories. And I can only eat a few squares of dark chocolate before my taste buds have had enough.
Eat protein from decent sources, mostly animals/fish
I’ve waffled on this so many times, being mostly vegetarian/pescatarian. But I think part of being overweight is eating unhealthy protein sources, which are basically processed/ plant based sources.
Calories are the enemy of being skinny, and getting your protein from soy vs. a steak represents a pretty decent difference in calories.
There are 134 calories in 1 oz of soybeans, vs. 71 calories in 1 oz of steak.
According to the linked chart, the soybeans have 2 more grams of protein, but soy’s bioavailability is lower, as are its friends pea protein, peanut protein, and rice protein.
After my chubby middle school life, the times I’ve weighed the most are times when I’ve tried to be mostly vegetarian. I find that I eat a lot of soy, rice and beans during those times, not necessarily to my benefit.
Lastly, don’t take section as license to eat a 16 oz steak. You should still go with the “credit card approach”, the guideline for the size of meat/fish protein you should eat at each meal. This ends up being in the 4–6oz range.
Also eggs and whey, can’t go wrong there.
Exercise
I actually didn’t exercise for a really long time. Exercise in my opinion is super important to being healthy, but not to being skinny.
What I think exercise does is sets an upper limit onto what you can consume. If you do cardio and lift weights, you get to eat more (yay). But if you don’t, you don’t get to chow down. When I was younger, I didn’t really exercise much at all. Through high school I only did one sport for one season (wrestling, oof). During that time I probably ate more than at any other time in my high school career.
So for exercise: the more you move, the more you can eat.
And the opposite is true: the less you move, the less you can eat.
To stay skinny, follow this very advanced mathematical formula:
Calories In ≦ Calories Out
The main advantage to strength training is that over time, your muscle mass will take more calories simply to exist. I learned that keeping muscle on in college and afterward helped me stay the same weight, despite the metabolism slow downs I hit in my 20s.
“I Have Hormone Issues”
Almost all hormone issues are identifiable and treatable. You simply take hormone supplements. If you want to lose weight, advocate with your doctor to get all the hormone tests that might be causing you to gain weight. And if the tests come back negative, you can either believe them or try and shop around to another doctor. But after a few tries, you might have to accept that you don’t have hormone issues.
My wife had lots of energy issues that were related to hormone problems, but she eventually got on supplements and moved past it. Don’t let that be a reason not to be skinny.
In Summary
- Find your healthy food to replace the unhealthy ones you eat
- Make unhealthy foods yourself if you really want them
- Eat good protein sources to feel satisfied
- Use exercise as the upper limit on how much you can eat (more moving -> more food)
- Fix hormone issues if you have them
