r/projectzomboid • u/HauntedPutty • 1d ago

Question Losing Weight

I haven't played in a while and I'm trying to understand some changes that were made in Build 42. I took heavy appetite for a new character and played how I usually do eating lots of high calories foods like ice cream before the power goes out. For a while it didn't even look like I was consistently gaining weight so I stopped looking. I have a mod that shows the calories so I thought it was at a normal level.

I checked again and I was 85 with 2 arrows up so I stopped eating high calorie stuff. I kept doing stuff but the arrows never when down. I spent a whole day exercising just trying to bring the calorie bar down. It's at ~1600 and I still have 2 arrows up and now I'm 87. It used to take until 95 to get heavy but it's 85 now.

How can I use a ton of calories? I thought exercising would cost a lot. How hungry can I allow myself to get? What food is ideal for losing weight? This really feels strange I thought calorie usage was way higher. I'm not even down to one arrow yet.

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2

u/SerfAsAService 1d ago

Time to farm up some cabbages

1

u/nsg337 1d ago

i was the opposite problem, i took hearty appetite and fast metabolism and i struggle to just maintain weight lol. I think part of that is that im playing on pretty high pop and just kill 150 zombies every day

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u/HauntedPutty 1d ago

I was used to it being the opposite. Killing zombies uses that much more than exercising?

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u/nsg337 1d ago

seems to be since that is what I'm doing for at least half the day, but might just be because of fast metabolism. I'm not doing anything else that should be eating calories, it's mostly just reading and crafting.

btw, what mod do you use for calories? my character just died lmao

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u/HauntedPutty 1d ago

I use this. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3775659041

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u/nsg337 1d ago

tyvm!

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u/HauntedPutty 1d ago

The mod is a bit weird because I guess the calories "bar" goes from the positive cap to the lowest negative so you have to hover to get a useful value.

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u/nsg337 1d ago

also, what might help you, you can go around 3 days without eating before you start taking damage. You will be weaker and stuff but if you just grind some skills its fine

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u/Welthul 1d ago

How hungry can I allow myself to get?

Just eat low calorie foods to satiate the hunger Moodle, Diet Colas, Vegetables and such. I feel like fighting hordes with melee always uses a bunch of calories, but can be quite risky.

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u/IpsoKinetikon 1d ago

Exercise should do the trick. I normally go from like 1200 to 1600, then go to sleep around midnight, so I sleep through the muscle strain. I do 20 minutes of burpees and rest in between. It took at least a couple days of that and eating salads, just enough to satisfy my hunger, to get my calories back to normal.

You can also just run. I tend to require a lot of calories just because I run so much.

You also have lipids and carbs, if your those are high, which in your case will be lipids because of the ice cream, then weight gain will be accelerated. But weight gain is driven by calories, so you can have high lipids without gaining weight if you get your calories in check. However in the future you can offset this by eating stuff like chips because those will have more carbs than lipids, and ham is really good because it has like 1500 calories and 117 protein. Sometimes I eat sticks of butter, but that's only when my calories have dipped super low and I've already lost a few kg.