The dieters' support thread

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Maybe you need to eat more.

i've read that people who end up gaining weight despite sub-1000 calorie/day diets [richard simmons in his pre-fitness days, and oprah winfrey] usually have severe metabolic problems brought on by repeated cycles of starvation diets bringing about severe muscle loss in addition to weight loss. the body has been conditioned to survive on fewer and fewer calories. without a lot of lean muscle mass to keep stoked, the body won't need to take in too many calories to support what remains. the only way out of this mess is to build the calorie-burning muscle tissues back up with sufficient intake of calories including proteins, combined with major weight-bearing exercise. and not in a hurry, either- this condition developed over time so the correction will also take a similar amount of time. but eventually the proper metabolism will be restored. in addition, a good mix of anaerobic and aerobic exercise creates a virtuous circle, in that more muscle building generates the hormone irisin which builds more brown fat [generates heat from calorie-burning] comes into play, in addition to white fat which starts emulating the behavior of the brown fat. i just read this all in today's newspaper.
anyways, the heavier one is, the more of a starting advantage one actually has in this case, because it takes real effort to move all that weight around, so you are doing muscle-building weight-bearing exercise everytime you go out for a good vigorous walk, the kind of walk that is like you are late for a meeting. but a good hard 1/2 hour walk is a good thing to start with, every day, rain or shine. when one has worked up to doing a fast-paced 1 hour walk, then one can start doing more vigorous things such as adding ankle/wrist weights while walking, hiking, biking at road bike speed and up hills, swimming a mile's worth of fast laps at the pool, et al. speaking of swimming, what helped me out in the beginning was just being able to swim laps without interruption, a mile's worth [roughly 33 laps in a typical 1/4 olympic scale pool]. for me who hates to be hot and sweaty, the pool was a godsend. it kept me cool and enabled me to work harder than i otherwise would have, in addition to exercising my whole body at once. i was told that a 1/2-hour-duration mile in the pool was equivalent to 5 miles running at a 6-minute-per-mile pace.

Starting weight: 235 lbs on a six-foot frame.

Typical daily menu: A peanut-butter sandwich for breakfast, two meat-and-cheese sandwiches for lunch, 3 ounces of meat (chicken, fish, or pork) for supper. All the fruits and vegetables I can scarf down for meals and in-between. Supper always includes tossed salad and home-made vinaigrette dressing. Water, coffee, or diet soda. No sugar or corn syrup. No candy, cakes, or other "junk" food. No fast food, either - if I don't prepare it, I don't eat it (except for apples and bananas, of course).

Exercise is about 1 mile of walking per day.

Done and done.

Sounds like it works for you, but I don't think that plan would work for most people. I'm not in the greatest shape in my life, I weigh 225 standing 5'7". Breakfast consists of a small apple, a small banana, and a low-carb high-protein cup of yogurt. Lunch consists of ramen noodles or a package of TGIF's BBQ chicken wings (lately) Dinner isn't too big, sometimes I'll eat the ramen noodles for dinner, but I'll also usually have 2 cups of raw vegetable juice made from spinach, kale, broccoli, carrot, tomato, beet, turnips, radish, pepper, cucumber, in different combinations. When I might have a pizza, I'll top it with the pulp from the green veggies I juice. Then I have 2 cups of raw fruit juice that usually comes from strawberries, apples, and pineapples. Throughout the day I snack on almonds and blueberries. I also like eating the almonds with a banana, as I think the salt complements the banana. I rarely eat fast-food, and if I do it's something like a single jr bacon-cheese burger to hold me over when I'm in a situation where I don't have time to prepare my food. Oh yeah, and I drink at least 6 beers every 2 to 3 days.

For exercise I jog 2 miles one day, and push myself to make 1 mile in under 9:30 minutes the next. My times aren't like they used to be, but I've let myself go this past year. One thing my weight is hurting me in is doing plyometrics. I can do them just fine, but my feet wind up killing me and I'll have to stop because of it.

Not much weight-loss on my part. I am down from a high of about 235. I'm sure the drinking could have something to do with it, but it's really the exercise that makes a difference. A little over a year ago, I got a lot more exercise in, and I weighed 175. I ate more then too, as well as drank. I'm going to have to start the p90x regimen again.

That results in massive weight gain.

Thank you for sharing- that's very interesting. That's my hope, for myself.
I stopped by the gym today (it doesn't officially open til tomorrow) and made an appointment for Thursday to meet with someone and talk about my "goals". I'll be swinging by tomorrow after school to check things out and at least walk for an hour on the treadmill.


I also love, love, love swimming, but alas, my gym doesn't have a pool. It will still be worth it just to not have to walk in the cold and be miles from home by myself.

I just re-discovered the most fun way to health that there is, if, like me, you enjoy eating real food rather than diet food.
I mentioned earlier in this thread that I was planning to start "bulking up". (I've done 5 weight-lifting workout sessions since then.)
Well, it wasn't until four days ago that I researched and discovered how many calories I'm supposed to eat.
I had trained my body to take around 2100 per day, during my recent weight loss.
But now that my goal has changed to muscling up, I learned that I'm supposed to be eating 2700-2800 on non-workout days, and 2850-2950 on workout days -- and 68 grams of fat!
Not only do I get to eat that much, I am required to eat that much in order to build muscle. What a cool fitness plan!

I started stuffing myself on Friday, and had very great difficulty eating as much as I'm supposed to, but succeeded.
I succeeded Saturday too, but had an emotionally-negative day because of how over-stuffed I felt. No physical effects, except just the annoyance of feeling too full. No pain, nausea, etc., thankfully.
Yesterday, the new calorie amount finally started to feel okay. I felt very full, but not in the negative, my-stomach's-under-so-much-pressure way.

True, I could have done this more gradually, but I didn't want my past workout session to not build muscle, so I decided to fast-track the muscle diet as much as I felt I could.
I'm pretty much adjusted to it as of today. Still feel full all the time, but I'm getting accustomed to it. Hell, I used to eat over 3,000 a day without even trying, and that was as late as 10 months ago!
Yet, now, 2700 is very difficult.
I had to have a beer and two cinnamon rolls to make it yesterday. I ran the numbers; cinnamon rolls and beer were what I needed, given the food available to me.
I COULD NOT eat nearly 2900 calories (I walked that day, so had to eat more) worth of low- and medium-calorie foods -- my stomach would have burst! Two cinn rolls were an easy 480, so I went for it to get the numbers I needed. The 10 grams of fat helped me toward my goal as well. Beer, 150 cal.

Anyway, if you want to eat like a normal person and look and feel better every day, go the bulking route. The fun way to get fit!

Fat intake is vital for several processes in building muscle. And yes, this means some fat gain with the muscle gain, but that's just the way it works: you gain at least some fat with muscle gain, and you lose at least some muscle with fat loss. You just have to mitigate those effects the best you can, through proper diet. You burn the fat later, as I plan to in July. (I just wanna see what 6 months of bulking up does, and then I'll finally tackle the last fat place on my body: my belly.)

Last edited by Ragtime on 16 Jan 2012, 7:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Pretty much, just I'm beginning to look like a powerlifter, for better or worse. Part of it is, sometimes I'll just like, eat the hell out of everything in my house. I feel a lot better and have a lot stronger lifts if I don't eat crap, though. So as much as eating honeybuns and all that is fun, not really a good longterm sustainable thing, at least that's what my experience tells me. Try to have a lot of fiber, too. Just because you're bulking doesn't mean you should eat crap, garbage in garbage out. However, lifting weights does give you some slack, or a LOT of slack, actually. Just, don't forego cardio completely either. But, winter isn't really a bad time to bulk up, as it's cold out, you know? However, all my lifting is always offset at least slightly by an hour of ice skating most days, but my ice skating is getting very much less intense, actually partially because of lifting making the movements ice skating so easy, that and I used to just skate around the rink really fast in hockey skates, now I gotta practice specific forms in my figure skates, without the emphasis on speed.

Really, right now I'm 190-200 pounds and 5'9, and a few people I've talked to said they don't believe I weigh that much. The only kinda negative physical feature of myself I don't like is a relatively small gut, but it's not too bad really. Just, remember, there is a breakeven point. IE, the most strong people have a LOT of bodyfat. IE, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCVZ80N-2Ns Benedikt Magnusson, 1015 deadlift, but he's also 300 pounds. I mean you're married and all, so your wife gotta live with you regardless, haha, but most people don't wanna look like that. I mean they can diet down, but alot of times dieting down makes you lose strength. Just something to keep in mind. But dude, you'll probably have so much fun once you get your hands on a real barbell and some heavier weights. http://i.imgur.com/HQvaA.jpg That pic, too.

So yeah, lifting heavy, eat a lot, feel pretty awesome. Hopefully by summer I can cut the bodyfat down some. But honestly, losing weight by eating like 2000 calories and "cardio" is really boring and unfun, and I don't even know how useful it is really beyond giving me "abs", my blood pressure and all that is better than ever, I can even run better, in part from doing the lower body compound lifts, so I don't know if it's worth losing weight if all it'll do is give me "abs."

I tried to make clear that the cinn buns thing was just a one-time necessity, but anyway, ya, I got some Kashi cereal, and it's about the highest-fiber cereal on the market. I'm ALL for high-quality foods -- problem is I don't want to eat us out of house and home. So, ya, some of it IS gonna be crap, but I minimize that as able. Like you said, there's no problem with eating some low-quality foods.



Ya, total judgment call there. Just depends on if you want the abs or not. Doesn't matter beyond that. I'm just looking forward to wearing the new stylish (but damn tiny) shirts my wife bought me, and just generally being less "spherical", lol.

Honestly, my favorite foods for energy and strength is brown rice. Brown rice has fiber, a small amount of protein, combined with beans it is a complete protein, and it's super cheap and not hard to cook. I'm thinking for "dieting" all I gotta do is just eat more home cooked rice and whatnot and I'll be fine really, just sometimes I don't do that. And uh, brown rice is cheaper than Kashi cereal, haha.

EDIT
At 190-200 I've got a size S shirt I can wear fairly confidently, and 34 jeans. I usually wear medium tshirts, though. I was down to 32 jeans at 180, though.

So great you're accomplishing goals!

every consider joining the YMCA? they generally have lap pools, as do Ballys' facilities.

They're also super expensive. (The one near me wants $54/a month.)

Sounds like you need more exercise. 500 calories seems like it's dangerously close to the minimum amount needed for the body to carry out it's basic functions. Do you have some kind of medical condition?

gee, that is what they charged me in 2006 before i had to drop them. at least they haven't gone up since then. as an alternative, you could try local high schools in your area, at least one of them will have a pool you can use for a nominal fee.

Hypothyroidism. I said "500 on average" because most days I simply don't eat. I might have a few small meals on the weekends at the urging of my parents, which really stacks on the pounds, but during the week it's water only. Although this past weekend spent at the bf's was a real pigout. During high school, I went months sometimes without eating, and stayed obese. I topped out at 215 last year (I'm 5'1") and lost nearly a hundred pounds with weight loss medication, which I'm fighting like a dog to keep off. I can get down to 114-something if I'm by myself long enough, but the instant I'm with people, the nagging me to eat begins.