WTF is is elbee?
lb = pound = l … b = el bee. I guess it’s supposed to be cute.
It’s like an elbow, but it’s a bee. Elbee.
that does seem pretty snarky but as I posted much earlier in the thread I havent lost a single pound in about 3 months, I have lost a couple waist sizes and my endurance has skyrocketed while my general fitness level is way higher.
start out slow with exercise, one big mistake is to think you can do 40 min of cardio after 3 years on the couch. I wasnt even in that bad of shape and I started with 10 min of cardio, with the weight lifting you can do one set lifting an amount that is a bit heavy but wont hurt you. just lift (or press or whatever) as many times as you reasonably can without straining and move on to a different machine or muscle group. after a couple weeks maybe make it 2 sets.
with food its really not that difficult to see areas that are obviously bad. at Subway you can get a foot long club or chicken breast WITH cheese for about 700 calories (no mayo or other fatty dressings) you could also get 3 cookies from Subway at about 630 calories…or grab a meal at a burger place with 1100-1500 calories. choosing a foot long sandwich with veggies that has less calories and more actual food is a no brainer.
OMG. I sure hope this person doesn’t really go around saying “elbee” out loud, instead of “pound”. :rolleyes:
I like to joke that Subway is one of the most bipolar fast food joints ever when it comes to healthy food. Super healthy chicken sandwich with veggies on whole weat bread? Check. Super fattening meatball marinara with cheeze that will put the entire McD’s menu to shame? Check.
Subway is a safe bet when I just want to grab something quick that’s healthy enough, but I always feel weird paying somebody else that much to make me a sandwich. Plus I don’t much care for the bread there. Too fluffy. You just have to know which things to grab off the menu. They are pretty good about putting the nutritional info out there for you to look up what you’re eating though.
Eating at places like Burger King and McDs, sometimes just asking them to leave stuff off can make a huge difference, like getting a burger without mayo. My wife pointed out that if you like Big Macs, but don’t want to eat THAT much burger, you can request one of their smaller burgers with the Big Mac sauce as a step down (then again, there isn’t a WHOLE lot at McDonalds that is strictly healthy either, but you might as well make your occasional morale visits a bit less unhealthy, right?). And of course, if you’re the sort to get the big soda with your meal every time, then getting a Diet Coke actually does make a huge difference compared to getting a regular soda, given how many calories you can fit into one of those big travel cups.
I’m tempted to START doing that, just because it sounds funny.
Elbees. Heh.
You can get them to make a salad out of what would normally be a sandwich, in most cases. It’s more or less like a chef’s salad. I don’t know if they can or will do this with something like the meatball sub, but I’ve had a salad there with turkey and cheese any number of times, and it’s a pretty good meal, especially since they have a good selection of veggies for a salad. I like the vinegar they have, and I have them leave off the oil. This is a quicker option than going to a real restaurant in most cases, and cheaper, too.
I suspect he is thinking:
One pound = 450 grams (roughly)
450 grams of fat = 4050 calories (again, roughly)
However, this logic doesn’t really apply because losing a pound of fat really means burning most of a pound of fat + associated tissues and blood and such. Which is where the 3500 number comes from.
Oooooh, that sounds good, actually.
I’m not sure either. The most basic way to lose weight is the figure out your basal metabolic weight at your current fitness level, and come in 500 calories under that number every day. You can do this by either restricting calories or burning calories, but that’s weight loss in a nutshell.
It worked for me - I had spreadsheets and calorie logs and even a bar graph. I lost 30 pounds.
I am convinced that at least a subset of obese persons are literally “carboholics”- for some reason, dense carbohydrates like refined sugar or white flour trigger a pleasure-addiction mechanism highly similar to how alcohol effects some people. I know this has been poo-pooed on this board before but it seems to match what I’ve observed, and it would explain why some people do great on low-carb diets. There isn’t a once-size-fits-all solution.
Actually, there is a one-size-fits-all solution.
Eating less works 100% of the time. For anyone.
That’s like saying “abstinence works 100% of the time”. Yes, if applied perfectly, it does, but people seem really, really BAD at applying it perfectly, and it carries a very high cost in terms of quality of life. I mean, I am really glad that doctors 50 years ago didn’t say "why are we researching this birth control crap? If people don’t want any more babies, they should stop having sex. That works every time. For anyone.
There are 1000 different ways to create a calorie deficit. Most of them cannot be sustained for any length of time for most people. Furthermore, most people cannot get good information on the handful of ways that really DO work well because there are NO MEDICAL DOCTORS that specialize in this stuff: it’s like if you had cancer, and instead of seeing an oncologist, you saw a chemotherapist and a radiologist and a surgeon but none of them actually talked to each other much or really focused on cancer as their specialty.
I have lost 40% of my body weight in 12 months, so I have some idea of what I am talking about. Creating a calorie deficit is quite possible, but it isn’t simple, and there’s precious little good advice out there. Telling someone struggling with morbid obesity to “eat less and exercise more” is like telling a cancer patient to “take drugs and get radiated”. Technically accurate, but absolutely fucking useless.
Silly thread.
Its a bit like saying everyone can gain muscle. Its true but everyone cant be Arnie, and some people will really struggle to put on any muscle at all, and there are obvious gender differences involved. It all depends what peoples underlying metabolism and body makeup is how realistic a particular goal might be. Yes that can be used as a copout but it also can be denied as part of the issue, because people who succeed at something want to believe it was ‘them’, with no other factors in their favour that maybe made it a bit easier for them than for the person next to them.
It doesnt meant you give up and dont try to get fitter than you are, but the idea one simple solution or goal applies across the board is ridiculous. Maintaining is the major part of the problem, and achieving that is tied to a number of factors.
Otara
I think it’s an extension of the belief that weight loss is hard and you have to suffer to get results. If you think the process requires emotional and physical pain, and you see someone who’s obviously getting results and they claim they’re doing something simple and easy, then it’s twistedly logical to think they must be lying to you. In your head, it would explain why they’re losing weight and you aren’t.
These people have a healthy amount of suspicion, but it’s directed the wrong way. They’re leery of the modest and simple approaches, but intrigued by the extraordinary all-cabbage diets and “lose 30 pounds a week!”-type claims. One of my co-workers decided that fasting for three days a week and then eating her heart’s content the next day was a better approach than mine. I decided the point wasn’t that important to me.
The delusional ability of overweight folks to find reasons not to reduce their calories can be seen in what happened the last time I posted in one of these threads, where I argued with some who claimed that the First Law of Thermodynamics didn’t apply to human beings. I was mocked openly in that thread, and then later off-board in both the Livejournal/Facebook Cult as well as both snarkboards, and even had at least one Doper think it was funny to make sexual slurs and death threats towards me.
Or like the time I posted hard cites that showed people - whether thin or fat - were absolutely crap as estimating their calories or remembering what they ate - and it got me more mockery and yes, that Doper favorite, sexual slurs.
When you face delusion like that, there’s pretty much no hope.
Una, it is never acceptable to make sexual slurs or any threat of violence. Period. I am sorry that happened to you.
Of course it is true a calorie deficit will cause weight loss. The problems however are multifold.
First, bodies are dynamic adaptive (or perhaps in this case, “maladaptive”) entities. The calorie out side adapts to the caloric restriction under many circumstances with a lower BMR. Often muscle is lost along with the fat in that weight loss and that lowers BMR too. The simple mantra of take in fewer than you burn ignores the fact that what a person burns is a dynamic beast. Increasing the amount of calories out as a body responds to calorie restriction over a prolonged period is doable, but it goes against what bodies have been programmed to do by evolution. As much as you have been mocked for invoking the First Law of Thermodynamics, many fat people have been called lazy or worse. Often much worse. Some have a long history of being bullied over their weight from early childhood on, of social and/or sexual rejection in adulthood, and of job opportunities that have passed them by. Take your feelings at having experienced those slurs and read through just this thread imagining living in that POV: “weak assed fatties”; “surgery is for the weak”; etc.
The op was straightforward enough: is it true that among those who are severely overweight diets will fail to keep weight off or to lose significant amounts of it in the first place, while bariatric surgery will succeed? The answer is simple enough as well: if anything that overstates the success rate of dieting for the morbidly obese who are living in a modern society not imprisoned as a POW or worse.
That doesn’t mean that some do not succeed; some do. And the question was not about the merely obese or overweight; only about 3% of Americans are morbidly obese, (or at least severely obese with a significant comorbidity like diabetes) and the target population of the op’s ad is them alone - not the … delusional … overweight folks. Lifestyle changes alone must be tried first, and with a realistic approach can be successful for some, even though all people are “absolutely crap as estimating their calories or remembering what they ate” but for many the surgical option is without doubt worth considering for those morbidly obese individuals (or severely obese with conditions such as diabetes) who have tried and failed to lose weight by lifestyle changes. And being told that their considering surgery is proof of their weakness is being bullied just as much a being called fatty on the playground was; discouraging someone who meets those criteria from getting the surgery, when supervised diet and exercise plans have failed for them in the past, may even be bullying those people to death.
Its kind of hard not to wonder if the frequent use of words like ‘delusional’ might have contributed a bit to some of the responses you got.
There are cognitive issues and kidding yourself and all those other aspects of the equation. But that isnt all of it.
Otara
Those delusions are rooted in a lack of decent information to counter them. If you just cut your calories without any plan, any system, any sense of which calories to cut and how many to cut, it really is impossible to sustain. What makes it worse is that any attempt to figure out a system, a plan, a method is met with “Just eat less, stupid. You’re eating too much. It’s simple. Quit looking for a magic bullet. You just have to suck it up”
Yes, the laws of thermodynamics apply to people. But saying that the laws of gravity apply to everyone doesn’t explain why jumping out of a plane with a parachute is a hobby, and jumping without one is a Bad Idea. Except with weight loss, asking for a parachute can lead to mockery: you got on the plan, you deserve to hit the ground full speed.
There is a persistent idea that obesity is a function of personality: it’s a manifestation of weakness, and that the key is learning to be tough. It’s not. It doesn’t take willpower to lose weight: it takes knowledge and persistence. I’ve lost 40% of my body weight in 12 months using less willpower than what it used to take me to just not get fatter. More work, but less willpower.