Imagine your 4-year-old kid wants to play in the bathtub. There are a few ways to set the right water level. You can adjust the faucet, how much goes out of the tub, or use a baby dam.

These (faucet, drain plug, dam) are leverage points—things you can do to change the water level.

In this post, I’ll discuss six types of leverage points that impact weight loss. From the lowest to the highest. A high leverage point can produce bigger changes than a low leverage point.

You will understand why some weight loss methods failed and how to find one that works in the long term. You’ll move from treating symptoms to seeing root causes. From the obvious to the hidden. From reacting to isolated events to addressing the deeper structures that connect them. From making trivial tweaks to doing what matters.

Numbersconstants and parameters

Body weight, body fat percentage, daily calorie intake, steps count, resting metabolic rate (RMR), etc. These are examples of numbers, constants, and parameters. Some numbers are easy to change while others take time.

For example, your daily calorie intake changes every day depending on how much you eat. Whereas your body fat percentage takes weeks or months. Why? Because your metabolism and hormones determine whether those calories get burned or stored as fat. Changing metabolism takes time. And you can't control your hormones.

Changes in these numbers determine how much weight you lose, or gain. Low-calorie intakes, high daily step count or high muscle mass increase weight loss. Whereas low metabolism, having more meals, or more processed carbs decreases it.

Changing numbers have the lowest leverage point because they are the results of a system. To borrow a line from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.”

Eat less and exercise more are the least effective ways to lose weight if the lifestyle that produces the initial weight gain remains the same.

Balancing & reinforcing feedback loops

Balancing feedback loops maintains a system within a desired level. A kettle has a balancing feedback loop that cuts off electricity once the water reaches boiling point. Your body uses similar feedback loops to maintain a core temperature of 37°C.

Your body doesn’t like to change. Which is why it has multiple balancing feedback loops that prevent you from losing weight. One of them is your metabolism.

When you drastically cut how much you eat, your body doesn’t see it as a “diet”—it sees it as a threat. It thinks you're starving. To keep you alive, it slows down your metabolism to conserve energy. It holds onto fat—because fat stores more energy per gram than protein or carbs—and instead breaks down your muscles for fuel.

At the same time, it increases ghrelin, the hunger hormone, making you feel even hungrier than before.

This is why many quick weight loss programs hit a plateau: your body fights back. Even though you're eating far less, fat loss slows, hunger intensifies, and progress stalls.

Reinforcing feedback loops is the opposite of balancing feedback loops. They are self-perpetuating. Compound interest in your savings account is an example of a reinforcing feedback loop. It grows over time if left alone.

Feedback loops are more than biological. It is often an interplay between behavioural, environmental, and biological. Take overeating as an example.

It can start with something simple like work stress. You are buried with meetings. You prefer burgers and chips because they are convenient. Stress also increases your appetite for sugary foods like cookies and ice creams. These foods leave you fatigued because they cause a sugar crash. Fatigue compounds your stress. When cortisol (a stress hormone) is high, your body also likes to store calories as visceral fat (fats around your organs). High visceral fat messes up your brain’s “I’m full” signal. Which creates more cravings and overeating. Each part of this system reinforces the next to create a vicious cycle that becomes harder to break over time.

A reinforcing feedback loop can also be positive. Say you start getting into a habit of walking 10 minutes a day. You notice some small improvements in your energy levels. This energy boost increases your motivation to exercise more. Physical activity lifts your mood, reducing stress and the urge to binge eat. As stress-eating decreases, it's become easier to stay consistent with healthy habits. This positive loop strengthens itself with each step.

Instead of just changing numbers, you gain a broader perspective with feedback loops. How parts are connected and how they affect one another. Instead of looking at a linear cause and effect (calorie in calorie out), you see how the effect becomes the cause of another loop.

Information flows

If numbers are individual LEGO blocks, and feedback loops are how they snap together, then information flows are the blueprint that turns them into that yellow bulldozer.

Imagine climbing a hill in the fog. You reach the top and think, “This must be the highest point.” But if you had a map, you’d find a much taller mountain nearby.

Numbers and feedback loops can take you to the top but they don’t tell you if there’s a taller mountain. This is the reason why information flows have higher leverage—they show you a better way to achieve your goals. They let you see the taller mountain.

For instance, let's say you run 3 times a week as part of your weight loss plan.

An information that explains why strength exercises are more effective than cardio to burn fat can change what workout you do. Changing a workout also changes everything that comes with it. Including the numbers. You might previously measure running distance (as a proxy to calories burned). But now you measure strength gained. This information also creates a new feedback loop.

Previously, run → burn more calories → lost weight

Now, lift weights → burn more calories (during workout & rest) → gain muscles → loss weight

Consider another piece of information that explains why the food you eat is more important than what exercise you do. This changes again your weight loss priorities.

This is not to say strength training is always better than cardio. But to illustrate how information flow can change what you do. And in some cases, produce significant changes.

Information often flows across multiple domains. For example:

  • What advertising food manufacturers use to market cookies (psychology)
  • Where the cookies sit in your pantry (environment)
  • When you grab them during Netflix time (behavioral patterns)
  • Why they taste so good (neuroscience)
  • How they cause metabolic dysfunction (biology)

These are powerful information flows that shape behavior. Understanding how they work can change how you tackle them. For example, changing your environment (once you know how it sabotages your efforts) might be more effective than relying on willpower to resist unhealthy foods.

Rules

Rules are constraints, incentives, and punishments. Rules like constraints determine what you can or cannot do. For example, you cannot change the biological rule that high blood sugar increases insulin levels. Or the economic rule that ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are more profitable than whole foods. Rules can also be self-imposed. For example:

  • Ice cream treat after a workout
  • No food 3 hours before bedtime
  • Get up and move around every 30 minutes

These rules simplify decisions. You plan what to do at specific times or which actions should follow others.

Rules have higher leverage than information flow because they change how you act and behave.

For example, consider how blue light from electronics can affect sleep quality. Knowing the science is empowering—but information alone isn't enough. You still need the willpower to act on it long enough to become a habit.

A “no screen an hour before bed” rule removes the need for willpower. The rule draws a clear line—if your bedtime is at 11 pm, then no screens after 10 pm. You don’t have to decide between going to bed or watching your favorite TV series. The rules have been decided for you.

Sometimes, an upstream rule can produce massive changes that remove 100 downstream decisions. For example, a “no grocery shopping before meal” rule not only removes the temptation to buy junk foods but also many decisions that come after.

  • When can I eat them?
  • How can I avoid binge eating?
  • How much should I allow myself to eat in one sitting?
  • Is it okay to have more today as a reward for my hard workout?
  • I just overeat. What should I do?

Rules are not fool-proofed. You can ignore them. In some cases, they are too rigid. This is where incentive and punishment can be useful. The laws of incentive (reward) and punishment (pain) can be simplified as:

  • More reward strengthens the habit
  • Less reward weakens habit
  • More pain weakens the habit
  • Less pain strengthens the habit

For example, if you want to exercise more, there are many ways you can achieve it.

  • Reduce distance, repetitions, or time (less pain)
  • I can do X (your hobby) after I exercise for an hour (more rewards + rules)
  • Remove sofa cushion (more pain + friction)
  • Place remote control in hard-to-reach places (less reward + friction)

Rules shape behavior by automating decisions and reducing reliance on willpower. While not perfect, they create a structure that eliminates countless downstream choices, making habits easier to adopt or break. Strategically applying rewards, penalties, or friction, rules is a powerful leverage point for long-term behavior change.

Goals

Goals give you direction—it’s your destination, your desired outcome. If your goal is to “lose 5kg,” you’re defining success by that result. The goal determines whether you’ve succeeded or failed.

Goals are one of the most powerful leverage points. Changing a goal, for example, from “losing 5kg” to “gaining 5kg”, changes everything from how you behave, and what rules to follow, to what incentives drive you, and what success looks like.

Goals can have layers. Losing 5kg is a goal. A higher-level goal for that might be “to fit into that beautiful dress”. While a lower-level goal to that might be “hit the gym 3x a week.”

The same reason goals are such powerful leverage points is also why they’re easy to get wrong. Because goals shape everything downstream—your strategies, habits, and metrics—setting the wrong goal can send you down the wrong direction.

Let’s say someone decides to be more active so he sets a goal to hit the gym three times a week but falls short because of work deadlines. He assumes the issue is a lack of discipline, so he dives deep into learning how to become more disciplined.

But the problem is a rigid goal not a lack of discipline. He can stay active working out at home or the nearby park on busy days. Or take the stairs instead of the elevator.

A vague goal can be just as problematic as a rigid goal. When your goal is too vague, it is easy to do things on impulse because a vague goal opens up many options.

Another common one is unrealistic goals such as losing 10kg in a month. It is unrealistic because it misaligns with your body’s survival goal. A goal can also be unrealistic if the effort required to achieve the goal exceeds what you can put in.

More often than not when you fail to hit your goal, the problem has more to do with the goal than your character.

Paradigms

A paradigm shift is a fundamental change in the way we think or approach something. A paradigm shift has the highest leverage point because changing how you see things changes your goals, your decisions, and how you measure success.

In the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus proposed that the Sun—not the Earth—is at the center of the universe. That discovery alters our understanding of the cosmos. Similarly, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection reshaped how we see humanity’s place in the natural world.

Our understanding of metabolic dysfunction has undergone two major paradigm shifts over the past 50 years.

The first major dietary shift began in the late 1970s. There was a growing belief that saturated fat caused heart disease. This heavily influenced public policy and nutrition guidelines. As a result, families replace traditional high-fat breakfasts like eggs and whole milk with low-fat, high-carbohydrate options such as cereals and orange juice.

However, obesity rates and heart disease continued to rise over the next 30 years even as fat consumption declined. Increasingly, studies began to point not to fat, but to added sugar and refined carbohydrates as the primary drivers of metabolic disease. This led to a second major dietary shift—from low-fat to low-sugar diets.

This also reveals something subtle—ideas that create a paradigm shift are often ones that contradict your beliefs.

Consider overeating. For a long time, most believe it was a personal discipline problem—something you could fix with more self-control. The calories in, calories out (CICO) model and the advice to “eat less, move more” became the go-to solution for health experts and personal trainers to overcome obesity and overeating.

But this solution has largely failed. Most people who follow this advice temporarily lose weight but regain it over time. Worse, it often leads to shame and guilt, as people associate their struggles with laziness.

A more recent insight suggests that the root cause of overeating isn’t a lack of discipline but hormonal disruption. Ultra-processed foods are chemically engineered to mess up the body’s hunger signal, fuel intense cravings, and make it difficult to stop eating, even when full.

This reframes the entire narrative from “I am the problem” to “The food is the problem”. As a result, you can create more effective ways like making it harder to buy junk foods or satisfy your cravings with better alternatives like nuts.

What all these mean

You used to focus on the obvious events—calories burned, weight on the scale, body fat. Now, you see the hidden roots: food engineering, hormonal feedback loops, the biological dance between food and body, and even how pain and pleasure shape behavior.

You start to see the full picture. The whole system—how one part influences another, which becomes the cause of yet another, and so on. No longer a simple line of cause and effect, but a living web.

To use a fighting video game analogy. You spent years fighting low-level thugs, thinking that’s the whole game—until you met the final boss. The one pulling all the strings. Now you’re not just fighting symptoms—you’re going upstream, targeting root causes. You’re asking:

What gave rise to the final boss in the first place? What environment nurtured it?

You shift from cure to prevention. From fighting weights to fighting what caused it.

To be clear, this isn’t about which leverage points are more important. Or which one to focus on. They are all important.

The point is to understand how they are interconnected. Like dancing. It’s not just your feet or arms that matter. But how your whole body moves together.

Same with weight loss. It’s not about fixing one isolated part but a dance of everything—nutrition, hormones, psychology, habits, and even your beliefs.

The number on the scale matters. But so does everything that produces that number.

Once you see how the puzzle fits together, your focus shifts from outcome to process. From “Did I lose weight today?” to “Am I doing the right things each day?”

You become patient. You understand the right process inevitably leads to the right outcome. So if your weight stalls, you don’t panic—you stay the course.

Because now you see what’s changing underneath.

The 6 Leverage Points of Weight Loss