Updated description with a link to a spreadsheet with a chart I intend to update daily.

Congrats on losing 30 kg! I'm also trying to lose weight so I'm wondering if you have any tips. Do you think diet or exercise contributed more to your weight loss? And for exercise how often do you work out per week on average and for how long (and roughly how much of that is on cardio vs weights)?

@parkerfriedland Sorry for the late answer.

A caloric deficit is necessary and sufficient to lose weight, and in order improve body composition (i.e. improve ratio of fat mass to lean mass) sufficiently stimulating resistance exercise and adequate protein intake is needed.

When it comes to achieving a caloric deficit it is a lot easier to decrease the intake rather than increasing the expenditure, partially because most people (and most devices people use) overestimate the expenditure from exercise but also because increased caloric expenditure isn't strictly additive but compensated for elsewhere (i.e. if you do 300 kcal worth of exercise, this will be partially compensated for and your total daily energy expenditure might only increase by 250 kcal, or even less). That being said, it's still a good idea to do some cardiovascular exercise for the health benefits, but there's no reason to spend hours upon hours on the treadmill.

When it comes to reducing energy intake there are a lot of approaches and most of the popular ones appear to work as long as you keep following them, but they all come with various downsides so it's up to you to decide which downsides you find the most acceptable. For me it's been logging every single piece of food I put in my mouth (preferably weighing it, otherwise guesstimating portion sizes) and trying to hit a weekly calorie target that is ~500kcal/day under my estimated daily energy expenditure. At first I created a spreadsheet that did weekly updates of my estimated energy expenditure from my logged intake and the observed weightloss (back-calculated as 1 kg lost being a ~7700 kcal deficit) which worked great but was a bit tedious. Later the Stronger by Science team launched an app called MacroFactor that has this functionality built in along with a food logger so now I just use that instead and it works great, can highly recommend it.

As far as exercise, I started of lifting 3.5 days per week (exactly every other day), doing Stronglifts 5x5, when that stalled after about 4 months (as expected, it is a linear beginner program) I switched to Martin Berkhan's RPT program which is a 3 times per week lift and ran that for about 6 months with decent results. After that I got in to powerlifting and have tried several different programs with varying frequency between 4-5 days per week. Currently I'm working together with a powerlifting coach called Matt Vena and we're doing 4 sessions per week (squats twice per week, deadlifts twice per week, bench press four times per week and then various accessory exercises spread over all the sessions), but that is more sport specific than anything I would recommend for general health and/or weight loss.

As far as cardio, I do very little structured cardio. When the weather is nice I like to bike commute to work and I go for walks sometimes but that is pretty much it.

Lastly, one of the most overlooked parts I think is the mindset/motivational part. Most people go out way to hard with an approach that is not sustainable. Things such as aiming to work out six days per week or going super low in calories or such. It usually works for a couple of weeks, until it they lose motivation and goes back to their old habits again. My recommendation is to start really easy and than slowly increase your interventions. It's a marathon not a sprint.

That last paragraph reminded me of this really good video series "Fatt loss dieting made simple" by Mike Israetel. It's ten videos (5-15 min each) outlining week by week what you concretely can do to improve your diet to sustain weight loss.

First week doesn't even start out with trying to intentionally achieve a deficit or changing what you eat, just start tracking your current intake so you become aware of what you eat and how much. Then it adds more stuff week by week until you have something pretty good and most likely sustainable. It's not until video 6 that an explicit deficit is even implemented.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsNeZjjOOl4&list=PLyqKj7LwU2RulAjHczohbx5OyJQ8TaFM0

@komplexkonjugat Are you tracking food mainly from a macronutrient perspective? There is this idea that hyperprocessed foods might often be metabolically different from whole foods, and that a calorie of one might not equate to the same net energy delivery to the body as a calorie of the other (really, you'd have to measure what's in your poop to know what your body retained, on net). Do you have an example of what you might actually eat in a typical day?

@AlQuinn My strategy is outlined in the description, third section. Not sure what you mean with "hyperprocessed food" the usual terminology in the literature is either ultra processed or hyper-palatable, which are related but not strictly equivalent some foods are both ultra processed and hyper-palatable (think of stuff like industrial snacks or ready to eat meal), some are ultra processed but not hyper-palatable (good example would be unflavoured casein powder, it's ultra proccessed but tastes like card board) and some things are hyper-palatable but not ultra processed (think home made deserts like fresh straw berries with whipped cream).

A fairly representative sample week can be seen in the following twitter thread from april last year where I targeted (and achieved) a 500 kcal deficit. It's in swedish but translates fairly well using the built in translation tool.

https://twitter.com/komplexkonjugat/status/1647681285073121282

@komplexkonjugat yeah I meant ultraprocessed. I was thinking about hyperpop when I wrote that lol. And if you're not American, that increases my belief that you will succeed. US food culture is terrible and is a big part of the extreme problem here.

Best wishes!