An abundance of reasons?
He’s older and more mature now, for one thing. His motivation is completely different this time around as well.
And anyway - why are you being so argumentative? The OP is an “ask the…” thread, not a “piss on his accomplishments” thread.
Man, are you sprinkling your breakfast cereal with glass shards?
Because I hear they’re both low carb and low fat.
I agree. I think it’s remarkable he was able to lose so much weight in that amount of time and would like to know more.
It’s hard to break bad habits. Often it take many tries. Just because some of the weight came back once doesn’t mean he can’t lose it eventually.
First - congratulations 
Second - how’d you have the TIME to work out so much? Do you work?
1.) Eating large quantities of bacon and meat at 17 and seeing no ill effects like high blood pressure or high cholesterol has little relevance to how your body will react to the same diet at 30.
2.) Many people would consider a daily restricted calorie intake and 30 minutes to an hour of light exercise vastly preferable to a high protein diet and 3+ hours of intense exercise.
3.) I’m skeptical that a 400 pound person, even a 17 year old, could walk “a few miles a day”.
4.) I’m skeptical that 2+ hours of intense daily exercise is good for someone weighing in excess of 300 pounds.
Wow, where to begin.
I totally forgot that my story could inspire rage from the “you’re doing it wrong” crowd. But now that I recall - there were people who said to my face, when I was 210 pounds, after they’d seen my change, who’d get angry and say you did it all wrong and you ruined your body and in a few months you’ll be fatter, etc. There’s a very strong drive for certain people to shit on this. I guess the idea is… you didn’t struggle enough with it, it didn’t take you years of banging your head against the wall with a low fat diet, it’s not legit. I’ve even had a few people - people who’d seen me at 350+ and then again at 200, who actually said to me “What you do just doesn’t work”… Uh, okay.
The sad thing is that I made this thread to try to be informative and help people - I thought people who were struggling with weight loss might have questions that I could answer - and instead this has turned into one guy desperately trying to shit all over it.
So anyway.
Obviously the diet wasn’t a failure. It’s as if I rode a motorboat up a river, got to my destination, said “eh I don’t feel like staying here”, then got out on a raft, and got pushed back down the river, and someone says “idiot, motorboats clearly won’t get you where you’re going” - it wasn’t the motor boat that failed.
Even if I regained all the weight (which I haven’t, 12 years later), it wouldn’t still make it worthless. Are the years I spent in good shape not worth anything, even if I were to eventually reach bad shape again? I spent ages 18-23 at 200-270 pounds instead of 380-450. How could that not be worth anything?
Referring to my weight gain as “the opportunity cost of a decade” is quite strange. To be clear, I gained more than 75 pounds back - at my highest I’ve been up in the 330s. But had I not done what I did, I’d have been 400 by the time I was 20, and over 400 for the next decade. Who knows what I’d be now. Is spending a decade starting at 200 getting up to 330 somehow worse than spending a decade starting at 400 and ending up worse from there?
Regarding what got me that fat in the first place - I get the impression that you get the “fatty in denial” thing from me, which is weird. I didn’t try to blame anyone for being fat or say it was a glandular problem or something. I took control of it.
But my statements are accurate. I ate with my friends all the time. I ate more than some of them, the same as others, but not more by much. The 3 cans of coke a day example is well underestimated. I rarely drank water and stayed hydrated by drinking two liters of pop. As I said, I was unusually active for my weight, so I’d be playing basketball or doing other stuff like that, sweating up a storm (staying active at 350+ pounds is quite a sweaty experience unfortunately), and rehydrate by drinking a ton of it. A two liter a day, which is a reasonable estimate, is 800 calories. All empty calories. It was extremely stupid - but as a kid I didn’t really know the impact and how much sugar was in those things. I wish my mom would’ve hit me with a shovel every time I tried to drink that shit, and it would’ve prevented a whole lot of problems. I can also compare my rate of weight gain before/after cutting those out.
I don’t know why you have a hardon for it. If I say I drank 2 liters of pepsi every day, I’m somehow denying my own role in being fat, but if I said I ate half a cake every day, then I’m taking responsibility? I’m just giving a factual account of what happened. You’ve just got a hardon either because you’ve struggled with weight yourself and had a miserable time with low fat diets and resent the rate of my success, or just because you’re a dick who likes to pile on fatties.
As an issue of strategy. I can’t go back to eating like crap, doing the thing that made me fat in the first place, and not expect to get fat. Duh. Somehow people conclude from this that you must lose weight using your ultimate maintenance plan. If you’re going to go low fat/low calorie for life, you must lose the weight that way. Why? If I had some bullshit 4 pounds a month of loss, starving all the time weight loss plan, I wouldn’t bother. I’d rather get fat and wait for my heart to explode. There’s no reason my eventual maintenance plan needs to be connected to the loss. I could lose all the weight, and then start a maintenance plan from there. Struggling as much as possible to lose it in the first place - deliberately - because that’s the “right way” is just nonsensical.
And yes, the motivations are different last time. Losing all that weight before was actually a net loss in happiness for me. I realize that’s a very strange reaction, but I tried to flesh it out in the OP. Which isn’t to say that I’m fatter while happier, but it did sour the whole thing to me and made me sort of let it go. Additionally, my primary motivation, as I said, was just to prove to myself that I could get control of my life and accomplish something big - job done. It wasn’t a lasting motivation after that.
This time around, I’m in the worst shape of my life in ways that hampers my ability to do things, and also I’ve got more in the way of health concerns now. The motivations are different. But even if I were to fail - even if I were to lose 100 pounds now and regain it over a few years, it’s still better than simply never doing it, and just gaining the 100 pounds instead.
In conclusion, treis. This isn’t the pit, so I can’t tell you what I want to, and I’m not a moderator, so I can’t give you instructions. But I will ask. I wrote this thread to share my story and hopefully be able to offer some advice to other people who need drastic weight loss. If your only purpose here is to try to shit all over the thread, get the hell out.
SeñorBeef, have you seen Mark’s Daily Apple? Seems like it would be right up your alley.
I never considered it, mostly because I hate running. Even when I was in good shape, I hated running. I’d do occasionally, but I just don’t like the way it bangs your knees around, and just… the whole sensation of it. Not my thing.
I didn’t really feel that it did. I realize that this is atypical, and my degree of depression probably plays a role in it. But as I said, I was already pretty active at that weight - I realize this is another thing you will probably think I’m lying to myself about - but I still did all sorts of physical normal teenage boy stuff with my friends. I mean - it was nice to be able to play a sport without being completely out of breath and sweating up a storm at all times, but it didn’t fundamentally change the activities I could and couldn’t do.
I do distinctly miss the feeling of knowing you could walk into any room and rip the arms off anyone in there, had the need arisen. There’s a primal manly ego boost in that.
I certainly was treated differently by people, including interest by women, but as I said, that only made me feel more shitty. I realize this runs very counterintuitive too. If I was a normal 18 year old BANG EVERYTHING THAT MOVES!!! type, I’d obviously have enjoyed greater success in that arena. I actually recall thinking about trying to meet someone via the internet (which was very much in its infancy then - dating, that is), let them get to know me a bit, and then send an old fat pic, and seeing who’d stick around to get to know me from there. And if it seemed to be working out - that they were able to like me anyway - surprise them with the good news. But I never did because I also am a big stickler for honesty and it never felt right.
I realize my reaction is vastly atypical - pretty much everyone else who has gone through that just says “woo! people don’t treat me like shit anymore!!!” - but I tend to be a bit more introspective and… crazy about stupid shit? I guess.
And.. no one really care about their long term health at 17. You might realize it rationally but it seems far off. I wasn’t near diabetes or suffering from any heart problems or really anything related to my weight at that point.
Not as yet, no. I’ve only yet committed to losing 50 pounds, and taking it from there. It would be a huge commitment to do more, and I want to feel it out.
I think the rapid rate of my previous weight loss gives the impression that it was easy. It happened fast, relative to more typical scenarios, but it was not easy.
Have you ever just pushed yourself to your limit one day? You’re feeling exhausted, but you decide… I’ll just do another 10 minutes. And after that, you’re completely spent, but just to see what you can do… add another 10 minutes. Well, I kept doing this until I was basically incapable of moving anymore. Every single day, for 9 months, without a day off, pushing myself to the edge. It was a more intense task than most people will ever try in their lives.
Now, granted, that level of dedication isn’t necesary for rapid weight loss. A more moderate plan will get you to where you’re going. But part of the appeal of it was for me to accomplish this gargantuan task, to just take up something and completely destroy it.
I don’t have that sort of thing in me anymore.
So as of now, I’m just going to lose 50 pounds and see how I feel after that. My health scares have at least motivated me enough to be more active (I’m in the worst shape of my life now), but I’m not sure if I have it in me to get in really good shape again.
Well, I was 17-18, so plenty of time. I find all of the “I don’t have time” excuses not to get in shape to be pretty weak. But yeah, I had all the time I needed for extensive workouts every day.
If being 17 was some magic cure to high blood pressure or high cholesterol, why did I have both before I started?
Nutritional science is backwards on this one, flat out. Most of the cholesterol in your body is produced by your liver - about 70-90% of it. What you take in in your diet is secondary. Insulin levels in the blood are what regulate the production of cholesterol in your liver - so you could quadrouple or more your dietary cholesterol intake, and combined with less insulin in your blood, you still come out with a lower cholesterol.
Same with triglycerides.
But… I’ll be able to prove this again soon enough. I got a lipid panel done before I started this, and I’ll get another one done in a month.
Good for them. They can lose their 3 pounds a month. I’d rather be fat.
And why is that? A few miles of walking really isn’t that big a deal, as far as muscles and endurance go, if you’re otherwise strong. The main problem is all that weight coming down on your feet - they hurt like hell and they’ll blister from all the pressure. But as far as the actual muscular endurance to do so, that’s entirely possible. It’s atypical, granted, because most people that weight that much get there through complete inactivity, which wasn’t the case with me.
But again, as I said, I realize it’s hard to believe, but I was strong and not completely out of shape at that weight. I actually had to walk about 5 miles last summer at 330 pounds, but in much worse shape, and it was far more of a struggle than I had at 17 at 380. I had to stop probably 10 times because I was getting overheated and worn out.
Why? What’s your specific concern with that?
[quote=“SenorBeef, post:29, topic:609675”]
So as of now, I’m just going to lose 50 pounds and see how I feel after that. My health scares have at least motivated me enough to be more active (I’m in the worst shape of my life now), but I’m not sure if I have it in me to get in really good shape again.
[QUOTE]
Dude. You are 30. This is nothing, a baby, a rank youngster.
You’re talking like you’re in your 80s and somewhere between the brink of no return and death. Why are you referring to 30 as some ancient point of no return, for shit’s sake? You’re a kid. I’m old enough to be your grandmother and feel fine. Really fine, actually.
I’m in my mid-50s and almost nothing is off the table. The friend I mentioned in my above post was in her late 40s when she lost all that weight; she’s closer to 60 than 50 now and doing great now.
Why are you carrying on like 30 is the new 80?
Indeed. I am 65 and began working out about 18 months ago. I lost around 30 lbs fairly quickly and have now gained a great deal of strength. I’m in better shape right now than I was at 30, when I smoked and had a desk job and spent a lot of time sitting around in bars. You can certainly get strong again, although it might take you longer!
SenorBeef,
You have not shared what the health scare was and there is no pressing need to, but if your current motivation includes your long term health then recognize that the biggest benefit is to be gained by losing just 10% of your current body weight, and keeping it off.
People lose weight on low carb. People lose weight on a wide variety of plans, so long as they stick with them, including through the plateaus. Low carb fits for who you are and if you are mostly concerned over your long term health and fitness then doing it fast or slow really matters much much less then the endurance event that follows, staying with a healthy lifestyle when you are no longer getting the reinforcer of seeing the scale drop and the comments about how you look so much thinner than you did just a short while ago.
I apologize for giving advice that is not asked for, but chiroptera’s comment deserves underlining. Succeeding at weight loss is nothing compared to the challenge of maintaining a long term healthy lifestyle. Assume that you will succeed, even if it takes somewhat longer than before, in losing the weight. The real success will be in setting reasonable goals for yourself that improve your long term outcomes, even if you can never rip anyone’s arms off again.
(Yes, 30 is just a pup. I didn’t do my first marathon until I was 40 and did my half ironman when I was 46. My current goal is to maintain or improve my fitness level without having an event hanging over my head. As I am now in my 50’s I am no longer as interested in endurance activities, even though I do still like a good long run or bike ride, as I am in building muscle mass with minimal fat mass to prevent sarcopenia in the next decades. In short, stop whining about how old you are.)
You and I have very different definitions of rage. You started an ask the guy thread and I asked a question. If you didn’t want anyone to question your story, why did you start the thread?
Yes, and you sure showed them how wrong they were.
This is a public forum. You’ve opened a thread in order to offer advice about losing weight, and I’ve answered the thread in that vein. Bad advice, contrary to scientific and medical recommendations doesn’t go unchallenged here. And there is no special exemption for weight loss threads. I don’t understand why you get so angry about being challenged, but that’s your issue. Weight loss is an issue for me, as I ballooned to 270 after college. Over the course of 3 years or so that has come down to about 200. So I know the effects of being fat personally, and it sucks being fat.
So when I see someone posting, and allow me to speak frankly, absolutely terrible advice, I feel required to respond. Because I know what it is like to be fat. My only hope here is to prevent someone reading the OP from saying “wow, if I starve myself and workout like hell, I can lose a ton of weight”. Because, as you as an example shows, it doesn’t work for long term weight loss.
My advice to anyone overweight is to identify the reason why you are overweight. Obviously, it ultimately comes down to eating too much and not exercising enough. But the point is to figure out why that is happening. My problem was that I would gorge, plus I was likely depressed and had other bad habits. Fixing those problems and getting back into better exercise/activity habits caused me to lose weight. I didn’t crash down. It was a slow process with too many starts and stops, but the weight is off, and I now have sustainable habits and activity level.
I think you did a great job losing the weight and keeping most of it off for so long. I know how hard it is to lose on Atkins a second time. You gave me the inspiration to start the diet. I spoke to my doctor about how to keep from gaining back what you lost on the atkins and he suggested staying low on carbs but going right onto weight watchers diet which is much less restrictive and try and follow that plan to keep the weight off for good.
You aren’t asking real questions, you’re offering rhetorical questions to attack me. I’m also not the only one to notice the obvious threadshitting, see posts 22, 23, and 24.
Additionally, I had 2 seperate people send me PMs about their own stories because they didn’t want to share them in a thread which they thought might turn into a bunch of bashing. So thanks for that.
Yes, actually. They were denying that I’d actually effectively lost weight - one in particular (my step mom) simply denied that it would work - at all - that you could lose weight that way - despite seeing me 100+ pounds lighter. She apparently thought I was using some sort of magic. Others insisted that I must be unhealthy, despite my doctor making every effort to find some way in which I wasn’t in perfect health and failing.
Let’s say I lose the 200 pounds, and I’m wildly happy, and decide to dedicate effort into staying that way. So after going extremely low carb to lose all the weight, I do what all the low carb plans say to do - introduce enough carbs to get enough food variety to make the diet a sustainable lifestyle choice. Or hell, let’s say I decide at that point to eat whatever I want, but calorie restrict it and excercise more and maintain the weight. Or hell, let’s say I eat whatever I want, but maintain my level of excercise so that I burn it off anyway.
If I had done any of those things, the weight would’ve stayed off. Does that render the method of losing the weight in the first place valid? By your definiton it would, and that’s why it’s stupid.
If after losing a ton of weight with that method, I decide it’s worthwhile to keep it off, and I do so, then that method of weight loss worked. If after a losing the same weight with that method, I decide it isnt worthwhile, and go back to eating in a way that will make me gain weight - how in the world is that evidence that the method of weight loss didn’t work? If I lost weight the “right way” through years of struggling with low calorie/low fat bullshit, and then at the end decided welp I made it, back to eating how I did before, I’d regain the weight too, so I guess then that method of losing weight is a failure too.
No, you didn’t. You haven’t asked one earnest question, nor have you asked my advice. You have done nothing but attack me. Your posts are an unambiguous threadshit.
It actually doesn’t run contrary to science. Recently the issue is beginning to be studied (sort of ridiculous that it took so long) and the methodology of low carb diets check out. They make all sorts of scientific sense. As far as medical recommendations - doctors are often wrong when it comes to recommending things that go against the historical grain. Still, lots of doctors now support low carbing. Knowledge and acceptance has increased over the last 12 years.
This shows that you aren’t even reading what I’m saying, because I never gave any indication whatsoever that I was starving myself. Quite the opposite - I explicitly say that I ate as much as I wanted.
Of course it does, if you stick with it. I didn’t. I could’ve. I decided it wasn’t worthwhile. Low calorie/low fat doesn’t work long term either if at some point you decide to stop doing it and then doing the same thing that got you fat in the first place. If you ran a marathon every day to lose weight, and then decided “well I’m going to stop running now and eat nothing but doritos”, would you conclude “clearly running marathons isn’t good for health or will help weight loss”?
Please leave this thread. You’ve already discouraged other people from posting, you’ve made it all about you, and you’ve probably already ruined the tone enough that it will not serve the purpose it was meant for. The only chance for recovering this thread is without your threadshitting.
Oh, back to advice. If you’re going to do a strength training regimen, learn what you’re doing. I go to the gym and see the majority of people lifting weights using poor technique. They use their back in isolation excercises, they rush through the release stroke, they use poor posture and all sorts of problems. I enrolled at a strength training class at the YMCA when I was 14 or so to learn all that stuff and it helped quite a bit. I’d imagine any gym you’d join would have similar sorts of classes.
I feel bad for the people I see using the bad technique all the time - they’re clearly putting effort into what they’re doing, but they’re minimizing their results and risking injury by winging it.
Feel free not to answer, but as a 28 year old male at 300+ I have to ask, what happened?
treis, this is an “ask the” thread and you’ve made it clear you’re not interested in asking, you’re interested in telling. At this point, you’ve completely hijacked SenorBeef’s thread in a manner that has been made clear to you is unwelcome, and discourages any other discussion in the spirit of the OP.
Cease and desist already. If you want to continue in this vein, please take your comments to your own thread.
SenorBeef, amazing success–I’m shocked that anyone would say otherwise. Thank you for starting this thread.
Do you still feel the same way about women who are more attracted to you as a normal-weight person than as an obese person, or have you gotten past that? I ask because that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. There will always be a physical component in dating, especially at the beginning stages. It isn’t shallow or cruel or wrong to not want to get involved in a romantic relationship with someone who is extremely overweight; attraction isn’t purely a cerebral thing, and even if it was, being severely overweight restricts your life in ways that many fit people aren’t interested in dealing with.
Also, have you considered learning to cook? I also eat a lower carb diet a-la “marks daily apple”, mentioned upthread (although not anywhere near as extreme; I’m more around 50-100 carbs a day and have been able to maintain weight loss on that easily with that and personally find that extremely low carb approaches make me feel pretty crappy.) No way would I be able to enjoy this way of eating if I wasn’t a good cook, though. Vegetables can be awesome; definitely look into roasting them, at least. Easy and way more delicious than normal veggies. Lower carb does not need to be monotonous, in fact it can encourage you to try new vegetables and seafood and whatnot. The way we eat now is crazy delicious.
I’d like to confirm the “easy to build muscle” thing, too. I’ve been in a bit of a slump with exercising the past few months. I don’t really enjoy lifting weights, even though I know it’s really good for me. So, I haven’t. Not a single weight in at least 4 months. But my husband has a pull-up bar in the basement. The other day I walked past it and decided to try. (Eating the way I used to, pretty much exactly how most doctors say is the best, I couldn’t do pull-ups, even working out regularly). After at least 4 months of no weight lifting at all, I was still able to do a pull-up easily.
Again, congratulations on your previous success, and all the best for the future.
What has been proven to work for long-term weight loss? Anything?
Name one weight-loss plan not involving surgery, personal dietitians and chefs, or anything else that most people wouldn’t be able to take advantage of, where it has been clinically demonstrated that and least 1/2 of the people who have lost >50 pounds with that plan have kept at least 1/2 of it off for at least 5 years.