The dieters' support thread

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As a person on a goal-oriented diet myself, I thought maybe we should have a thread for current dieters who perhaps want to relate and give updates of their personal progress here, in the hope that maybe we could encourage each other to stay with it through our personal updates.

Myself, I'm at 173 pounds (I'm only 5' 6.5") right now, and I'm wanting to at least get down to 160. I'm losing about a pound per week through moderate dieting/exercise. My wife is not overweight by any means, and I'd like to become normal weight as well. I've been significantly overweight for several years, and would like a change.

your present body mass index is 27.5. if you reduce to 157, it will drop to a shade below 25, which is considered the top of the healthy weight range for a person of your height. this is doable without too much strain, by small measures over a relatively short period of time [4 months at the most] by losing 1# per week, by taking numerous small steps, such as:
*parking your car as far away as possible and walking to and from your employment site;
*drinking an extra calorie-free ice-cold drink every meal, in lieu of a caloric drink such as coffee with the usual goodies in it, or a sugary soda;
*sleeping with the thermostat set low at night, or with less [or no] bedclothing or blankets, as your body will have to work harder at maintaining its normal temperature, as it would by you drinking ice-cold drinks;
*walking at a fast pace for an extra half-hour each day, in conjunction with lean muscle-mass -building exercises such as crunches and pushups/pullups;
*eliminating any white foods [starches, refined flours and sugars] from your diet, as well as adding some fiber to each meal [such as a can of V-8 juice];
*doing calisthenics during tv commercials
*walking around the employment site while eating your sack lunch.
good luck

I've been trying to get my weight down for years. My necessary medications an all cause weight gain, and years of having an eating disorder has killed my metabolism. I guess you could say I'm fighting an uphill battle. I'm still battling though. Good thing my Hubby likes curves.

My weight 61.7kg and my height 173cm.

Currently very little muscle mass so the figures make me sound slimmer/fitter than I actually am.

Have been going to three physical activity classes ( one yoga, one mixed aerobics and musculation, one cardio-walking ), per week since late September, and am doing the odd bit of weights ( to ExerciseTV and ThinQ Fitness videos online; I particularly like Pierre Pozutto :lol ), because I want to be strong enough to use the second-hand scooter that I bought two months ago but can barely manipulate/keep upright/control when on a slope/tight corner/cobbled streets etc, and also to enable me to participate in DIY work renovating our decrepit house ... because at the moment my arms are like spaghetti ( in terms of muscle strength ), and I get tired very fast.

I weighed 56kg a year ago, after three years on a gluten-free diet, and was very happy with and "in" my body, but then I reintroduced gluten in January/February this year, because I was feeling so secure and confident about so many things that I thought I could "afford" to, but not only have I begun to see the return of depression, anxiety, obsessiveness, and irritability etc which plagued me previous to the three years gluten-free, but I also put on nearly 10kg in the five-six months to June/July this year.

My beautifully baggy trousers/leggings stopped looking so baggy/"good", and several of the tighter ones no longer fitted, and I felt much less energetic.

I didn't immediately cut out gluten again, because I was enjoying bread, and pizza, and other glutenous delights so much, and my mental state was still euphoric on the whole, and I thought that simply avoiding "bad mixtures" ( of concentrated carbos and concentrated proteins, like pizza! ), would do the trick, but the trouble is that bread is sooo good with cheese, and and and ... and so although I have managed to lose about 4kg since then it has kept piling on again, so have recently gone gluten-free again, because it had such a huge effect last time ( from 74kg in October 2007 to 56kg this January ).

This time I want to get strong too. Am fed up of feeling/being feeble.
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@auntblabby Thanks for all the good info.

prego did i mention that drinking spicy v-8 juice both fills your stomach as well as dulling your appetite. i find that the undiluted spicy drink is too strong for me so i cut it with tomato juice or a mixture of about a 1/4 cup of salt/sugarfree ketchup and a level tablespoon of onion powder.

One thing I think I figured out yesterday, eggs are a really filling food. Like you don't feel hungry later if you eat a few eggs. Go eggs.

I wouldn't pay much attention to BMI. A couple years ago, I was 5'7" and weighed 180, but I could fit in size 30 pants and wear medium shirts. Definately not near as obese as my BMI was, which was 28 something.

Overdid it on the dang treadmill Saturday -- pulled a back muscle without even knowing it. Or, perhaps I simply worked my muscles until they were overly tender, and then ended up sleeping wrong that night for that particular muscle. It's just on the right side of my lower back, and it is as stiff as a board and very painful when moving. Getting slightly better now that it's Monday. The other side never even hurt a little. I don't remember doing any kind of weird or twisting motion on the treadmill, so it must have been the position I slept in while my muscles were so tender that messed it up, because the extreme stiffness and pain started as soon as I woke up the morning after the workout.

Still sticking to my diet. And I'm able to calculate, using my daily calorie intake logs, along with my known break-even calorie-intake amount (2,500), how many pounds I've lost per week in a more accurate way than a scale can, because of differing amounts of weighty food in my system. I lost slightly over 1 pound in the past 7 days, which means I met my goal.
Going on another 7 days and another pound...

Can I recommend something way cooler than a treadmill? A slideboard!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmDZBPt0j94[/youtube]

I use these for getting skating stroke power, they're loads of fun, much more than a treadmill. A treadmill to me is completely pointless as I can just go walk outside, but I digress.

Really though, for me having a sport I like makes the whole dieting thing like 100 times easier, because instead of a vague "I wanna lose weight and be healthy" kinda goal, it's now a competitive goal. Like right now I've gotten lazy with my diet, so the results show when you're in your sports, but exercise is easy, as you're playing a sport, and then any complimentary exercise for your sport is just basically training. I managed to make great weight loss, I went from 215 in March last year to 190 now, and during the summer I was down at 180 even, just winter sucks and helps me to gain weight as I sorta instinctively eat more food I guess.

My advice basically is, don't worry about it too much. Just don't eat crap, eat food that's good for you, be mindful somewhat of the calories, but try not to obsess over them, and get lots and lots of exercise, that you first off enjoy, and second off, get sorta an exercise that'll work everything in lots of different ways. For me, I enjoy skating as it requires power and cardio to "work" so it's aerobic and anaerobic at the same time. Cycling too I enjoyed for that reason. Weights aren't bad either, the more lean muscle mass you got, the more calories you burn. Weights are sweet, me personally, I like going for more a powerlifting kinda routine, which is kinda not conductive to weight loss, but it can be if you just don't eat as much. But, more muscle mass, you'll burn off calories like nothing. Some people don't do cardio at all, which is foolish, but yeah, weight lifting is pretty great. The last thing, make sure you get enough protein. Most people don't care about protein unless they're lifting, but from what I can read, people who are active for like an hour a day, ie, runners, etc, need like 1g of protein per KG of bodyweight. If your muscles are hurting on a treadmill, it does mean you're working them, and protein will help you recover from injuries (I'm not talking huge injuries, but pulled muscles, strains, etc) faster, as your body will have more material to rebuild the muscle.

Good luck, but yeah, that's my advice.

Well, I do just walk outside when the weather is nice, but in the region where I live, nice weather is rare. The treadmill is provided free for me to use at my apartment complex, so I take advantage. And my wife and I got into tennis a couple weeks ago, and that is definitely helping. She just overdid it (strained her arms), and hasn't been eating well so her recovery from overdoing it has been very slow. But we're gonna get back out there, and I could tell that I was burning A LOT, and having fun while doing it.

What I learned a few months ago was that, even if you eat healthy, you HAVE to be aware of the daily amount of calories -- even if you ate nothing but fat free food. Why? Because every calorie you eat over your break-even point stores as fat. It's true. All calories which aren't burned convert to and are stored as fat on your body. I was eating mostly healthy things, working out a scary high amount, and STILL gaining weight (that wasn't muscle). Why? Because I was eating over 3,000 calories per day of the healthy food. It didn't matter that it was healthy food, it mattered how much of it I was eating.

So, after learning that, I've also confirmed through experimentation that my calorie intake/burning is the factor that determines my weight loss/gain.

calories are not always just calories, IOW "empty" calories definitely do not end up as "empty" on the person who consumes them. low-glycemic-index foods are the way to go, IOW eat nothing white/refined/starchy, eat more lean proteins such as fish/fowl/soy/tvp, more oats and quinoa and brown rice, make dairy products an accent rather than a major meal portion. there is some wisdom to the adkins philosophy of limited carb intake, some folk are ill-suited for eating more than small portions of carbs, unless they are unrefined. i know i am one of those people. and train without straining, strain is bad for the system all over. take better care of your muscles/joints/bones and they will take better care of you. learn to be more sensitive to the sometimes subtle signals your body sends you. if you feel a twinge, don't just try to force your way through it but pay closer attention to it, which means backing off a bit on the intensity of your exercise. don't be in a hurry to get fit, let it take its natural time. the pounds will come off eventually. but you may find that as you build lean muscle mass you will start gaining a little weight again- not to worry. you need the extra muscle to burn calories and to enable you to keep on going in a virtuous circle of fitness. you will find that once your core muscles are taut and toned, you will feel less fragile in terms of getting injuries from vigorous activity, your muscles will better support you. i hope this ramble made some sense.

I don't eat many vegetables, unless I juice them. I love juicing, it's easy and healthy. You'll be surprised what color you can turn your stool and urine by what vegetables you juice!

You can skip a meal for every 16-20oz of juice you drink. You can because you'll most likely getting too many calories that don't do much for you, while getting a lesser amount of calories that are a magnitude more dense in nutrients. You should more readily absorb them, because the juicing makes the vegetable come pre-broken down.

i find its loads cheaper just to buy some generic veggie juice at the local discount market. saves me on electricity, on the juicer and on the premium prices for sufficient amounts of fresh veggies nowadays. it takes a lot of veggies to make a full tall glass of veggie juice. and remember that juicers mostly throw out the major part of the veggies which is the fiber. use a vitamix to get the whole veggie and not just the juice. but vitamix machines cost a king's ransom so once again it's cheaper to buy commercial veggie juice [made from the whole veggie by industrial versions of the vitamix].

I'm a normal weight now, having struggled with obesity most of my life (at 118, I weigh 30+ lbs less than I did at the start of middle school).
But I've been maintaining it unhealthily (read: starving and laxatives), and soon hope to develop a healthier relationship with food by devising some simple, easy recipes. I've never really learned how to cook, so that's challenging, and being a wheat-free vegan makes it doubly-so. Tomorrow I'm going to explore some basic food prices at my local grocery so I can get an inventory of nutritional and price info for different places, and start to put meal plans together. The only thing I've perfected thus far is a pumpkin cake: wheat free, dairy-free, egg-free, sugar-free, and oil-free. It was a smashing success, but I can't just eat cake all the time. Hence me being on this thread!

Good luck to everyone!

This is one of the things I've been excited to try! I recently got a food processor as an early Christmas gift, and plan to go to town with it!