Happy birthday, Khadaji!
I only officially weigh at my doctor’s office every month, so I don’t have a December report yet. My home scale weighs me five pounds heavier than my surgeon’s scale, and my PCP’s scale weighs me five pounds heavier than my home scale. So I only rely on the numbers from my surgeon’s scale!
Great work, everyone, especially considering the holidays!
I am at 263# as of last night, up one half from 12/1. I went up to 265 last week and back down near my low. I am now up to 1000+ calories per workout on the elliptical, 5 days a week, and so I can eat a little more than just chicken, salads and vegetables. I have also turned up the resistance on the elliptical machine…instead of level 5 or 6 last month, I am now at level 10 or 11 and maintain the same RPMs on the elliptical. So now I can crank out 1000 calories in 50-52 minutes which is 19-20 calories a minute! I set the machine for 55 minutes though so I can do a cooldown and I shoot for 1050c which equates to 1.5 pounds of fat burned per week. Even though I am on a plateau of sorts with my weight, I still see some redistribution of my physique which has been getting compliments from my staff at work and even my sister-in-laws. I am getting addicted to the compliments and it makes me want to shoot for 1400 calories a session. But I think I need to keep the sessions at an hour so I don’t get home too late (dinner and kids await).
Ginger, I saw the Tanita scales (and liked what I saw) and I asked my wife for one as a Christmas present. Thanks for mentioning them here!
No problem, Yeticus.
I started working today for a family friend during their Christmas rush. They own a chocolaterie. Thank Og for my iron will or I’d be so completely fucked.
IANA Nutritionist, or a Physical Whatsitorwhoozit, but this is what I’ve learned from reading up.
The human body naturally loses lean mass as you get older. If you look at body fat charts, for example, the same caliper readings yield an increasingly higher body fat percentage as the age of the subject goes up, particularly past the age of 30.
So when you weighed 200 lbs. 10 years ago, you were probably less fat (in proportion to your lean mass) than when you weight 200 lbs. now, hence your retention of the double chin at a weight where you once had none. This is also why it is important not to track your progress based on weight but on percentage of body fat (as I’ve mentioned before).
This is also why focusing on calorie restriction and aerobic exercise alone (such as walking, running, jogging, biking, etc.) isn’t good enough for the long term. You can get your weight down, even your percent fat down to, say, 18% and 190 lbs., and then eat exactly the same number of calories per day for the next ten years and not gain another pound… But in another 10 years you’ll be up to 20% fat or more just from the natural process of aging.
You can reverse or halt the loss of lean mass only by building it up through weight training. The good thing is that you can do this at any time of your life. And it also helps the fight to lose fat: it’s primarily your lean mass that metabolically burns calories, fat is pretty much just inert baggage your body carries around for future fuel.
Thank you for the great post.
I guess that will need to be my next goal. Weight training and crunches. It has been 18 years since I did any. It will be very hard to get started again.
Again, Thank You,
Jim
Some of you may have seen my other thread about my experience over the last month since my doctor started me on Topamax. This was one of the things that happened when I finally got into the program at the weight loss center at the local hospital. My doctor had gotten me on the waiting list and they finally called in November to say that it was my turn.
I’ve tried just about every diet in the book over the years, and I’ve even been in several in-patient places…but I always seem to gain the weight back…
Since I’ve been on the Topamax I haven’t lost a lot yet (2 lbs) but as of my last doctor visit (9 days ago) my dosage increased to 100mg and it’s really made a big difference to me. I know when I see the doctor again on the 20th I will see a difference on the scales.
For now, I’m going to keep the 1st digit masked…but here’s my weight record…
Nov ?? 2006 (start) weight: x48
Nov 29 2006 net loss - 2 weight: x46
Dec 04 2006 net loss - 5.5 weight: x42.5
I’ve always been a very picky eater…and I don’t like to cook. Just too lazy I guess. This visit with the doctor, my agreement was to eliminate fast food for dinner. I am supposed to either cook dinner at home or make a boxed dinner. So far I’ve stuck with my promise. I’ve also not had any sweets (candy or cookies) and that’s a REAL accomplishment for me as I’m a real sugar addict.
I have been very good all week - despite the fact that a co-worker has been begging me to go out drinking almost every night. He is young yet and probably can still get away with that kind of behaviour. I have politely declined each day.
I do have a christmas party tonight and so I will have to be very careful to bank some calaries today, so that I can indulge a little tonight. It would probably be more healthy to simply be good tonight, but hey, a man’s gotta know his limitations. 
We’re having our annual holiday party today. I’ve been baking like a madwoman for the past week. Og grant me strength.
I haven’t posted for a while, but started November at 195.2 and ended it at 191.3. Lost 3.9 lbs. Nothing to sneeze at, but definitely off my pace.
I can see as I approach my target of 165 (from a high of about 245), the weight is harded to shed.
I am doing weight watchers, and I really like it alot. But I used to have points to spare at the end of each night. Now I am down to a daily allowance of 24 points and I am always hungry. I am going to the gym 4 or 5 times a week, running and doing weight training as well as mixing in some isometric stuff like lunges and abwork. Yet the weight is sorta hanging on. I am a little discouraged. Evern the activity points aren’t sating my appetite.
Any ideas?
Well this Friday’s weigh-in shows I lost only 1 lb from last week. But it IS a loss and I DID decide having movie theatre popcorn was worth the disappointment. I’m thinking now that it wasn’t, but know I know.
But 182.4 is better than 190 and I’m keeping that in mind! I’m DOING this and it’s a process that will involve setbacks as I learn my limits. But dammit, I’m feeling disappointed in myself. 
I’m still hovering. I’m doing cycling class twice a week and trying to do weights at least twice a week (legs one day, arms the next.)
I’m going to have Ivylad measure me again. I’m getting a bit discouraged. We’ll see what the tape measure has to say. But I have lost 10-12 pounds since I started seriously going to the gym, but I can’t seem to get past this damn plateau. I just don’t want to face the sneaking suspicion this may be as far as I can go.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to eat LESS while INCREASING your activity over an extended period of time. Your body isn’t built for it.
Think about it. What causes weight gain? You take in more calories than you expend. This weight can be gained either as muscle or fat, depending on your activity. First your body will use it to build/repair muscle cells as needed; what’s left over is stored as fat. Most people intuitively understand this.
But assuming you have too much fat, you need to lose it. What causes weight loss? Expending more calories than you take in.
But the weight loss can again be lost as either muscle or fat. This is what people do not intuitively understand: just as the body first builds muscle before storing fat, it will eventually enter a mode of eating the muscle before fat after a sustained (significant) calorie deficit. This is rather dramatically called “starvation mode”, as it is presumably how our prehistoric ancestors evolved to survive long periods of low food availability: by stretching out the most efficient form of stored energy (body fat) to last longer by making its retention a priority.
This is the basis for the common phenomenon of “yo-yo dieting”. Most people’s approach to losing unwanted fat is to “lose weight” by “going on a diet”. This often works great at first, a period of a couple of weeks, then, the progress stops as the body goes into “conservation mode” (aka “starvation mode”).
This also makes them lethargic and harder to keep up higher levels of activity. They may even become LESS active to compensate for the lower energy levels (a natural reaction). Eventually the dieter gives up, or reaches the “target weight” and deems the diet “over”, and eats a normal amount again… Which results in weight gain, since their metabolism has been permanently lowered due to lower lean mass and activity levels.
What’s the answer? As Tom Venuto described in the title of his excellent book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle! Don’t “starve the fat”… “Burn” the fat with activity, and “feed” the muscle with an appropriate caloric support level and weight training. In his book, he advisese not cut your calories below a 20% deficit at most from “maintenance” while factoring in your activity level. Do the calculations and you’ll likely find you’re eating way too LITTLE for the amount of activity you’re doing.
And if you reach a point where you find you’re eating too little for the activity level you’re maintaining… Don’t slack off, eat more! After all, it’s much harder to ratchet up your activity level once it goes back down, than it would be to simply eat more, which you already naturally want to do, right?
There’s a whole lot of standard advice in his book as well about eating better (e.g., avoiding refined carbs and trans fats in favor of whole grains and “good” fats), and eating more frequent smaller meals throughout the day to keep the metabolism up. But more than anything else, he is very practical and not “religious” about any of his advice. “Do what works” is the maxim; everybody is different and will react differently to diet and exercise programs. Some people can get away with exercising less or eating less perfect than others, who need nearly perfect rigor to make any headway. Find your “zone” and work within it.
Following his advice I have been very happy in losing 46 lbs. over the past 7 months, dropping my body fat percentage from 31.5% to 18.5%, and have almost hit my year-end goals for body fat and weight. As I’ve approached my year-end goals I admit I’ve allowed myself more “cheating”, which has retarded my progress but not halted it completely, which I’ve decided is a perfectly good way to enjoy my holidays!
One more suggestion (that I have considered but have yet to try myself): you could try wearing a weighted vest while doing your running. One of the reasons the going gets tougher as you go along is that as you lose the weight, it is that much easier to do the running. In other words, running for 20 minutes at (say) 6 MPH on a treadmill when you were 245 burned a lot more calories than it does now that you’re at least 50 lbs. lighter! To compare, just try putting a 6 or 7 year old child on you piggyback and get on that treadmill again… Or that weighted vest
You could also just run at a faster pace or for a longer duration of time, but since time is the least available resource for most people and there’s a limit to how hard you can safely push your heart rate, the weighted vest is another way you can increase the effectiveness of your workout. (Or start using the incline on the treadmill if you are using one of those machines for the running.)
Well, I was not as bad as I thought I might be. But I drank alot. Not much food. Overall I was only minorly bad.
Well, since I’m actually going to WW meetings and doing the program the right way this time, I might as well participate here.
I started WW two weeks ago. My starting weight was 449 pounds. Last week’s weigh-in, I was 436 pounds. This week (yesterday morning), I weighed in at 433.8. So I’ve lost 15.2 pounds in two weeks.
I’ve been around the WW block often enough to know that this is NOT going to be a general average. But I’m ready for it this time, since supervenusfreak is doing the same thing so I have him to keep me on the straight and narrow.
We went to Ginger’s holiday party yesterday and I think I did pretty darn good! I had 1 piece of about 4 different desserts, just to taste them, and kept to my specially-formulated-to-be-WW-compliant bean salad (which was absolutely terrific, thanks to supervenusfreak) for the bulk of my meal. Then I had a slice of turkey and some mashed potatoes (no gravy).
Though I DID want to demolish the butter tarts. Mmmm…
I’ve lost 1/4" in my hips. Everything else has stayed the same, except my thighs, which are a bit bigger, probably due to the weights.
Sigh.
As often happens after a night of driking, I am craving carbs real bad. I would love a pizza right now. The only thing saving me is no one delivers to this area and I’m too lazy to go out and get one.
I will have to have something soon, or I will lose my resolve. I dunno what I have that will end the craving though. (my larder is not well stocked right now.)
Butter farts. 
They’re seriously bad, but worth the point or two.
I made a wonderful chicken wrap with peppers, onions and some tasty spices tonight that satisfied my craving for taco bell style food. Lately it’s hard to find creative solutions to the things that I normally crave, like giant plates of pasta with tons of sauce.
Anyone have any favorite recipes/recipe resources (books, web, whatever you like) ? I want to get a collection going of easy to make meals that I can use for dinnertime when the “can’t I just order out?” urge hits.
Elysium, I don’t know about you, but for me, the “Why can’t I just order out?” thing strikes when I’m not prepared. I’m too tired to cook, and not prepared with something easy to throw together. Here are some things that might help:
Pre-cook meats. Brown lean ground beef, sautee and simmer chicken breast strips, etc. This makes it easy to throw together some tacos or wraps, you can top a great big salad with the chicken strips, etc.
Likewise, slice (or dice) and freeze some of your favorite veggies. We always have diced red peppers in the freezer, as well as onions and mushrooms. These veggies cannot be used as raw, but are an easy addition to wraps, omelets, etc.
If there’s something particular you like, such as chili, soups, or stews, make a big pot on the weekend, and freeze it in individual serving sizes.
If you want a plate heaping with pasta and sauce, use a smaller plate. Seriously. I have luncheon plates. They’re bigger than saucers, but smaller than dinner plates. Psychologically, it’s much more satisfying to sit down in front of a full plate.
Good luck!