Diets, weight loss, etc.

In My Humble Opinion
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I hate to admit this, but those McDonald’s pedometers are cool. As such, (God! I don’t want to say this!!!) I find myself trying to walk more, so I can get that little digital number higher than yesterday. Did their marketing work? In the spirit of being defensive: no. I’m easily amazed. However, after looking at 2 days’ tallies, I’m wondering why I haven’t lost weight before.
Yesterday: Almost 5.5 miles
Today: 6.1 miles

I don’t eat particularly healthily, but it’s not bad. Last 3 days’ food logs:
Thursday:
Breakfast: bowl of cereal (honey nut cheerios)
Snack: Diet Pepsi and a small bag of Combos snacks
Lunch/Dinner (it was in between…): Diet Coke, grilled chicken caesar salad (Mcdonald’s), light vinaigrette dressing.
Snack later: An apple pie and a bottle of water.

Friday:
Breakfast: Cereal (honey nut cheerios)
Some Halls Fruit breezers (A pack = 6 or 8) and Diet pepsi spread out over a couple hours
Lunch: Slice of pizza, one of those 1.5 ounce bags dry roasted peanuts (Hijack: Does anyone here think those have a weird meaty taste?), some fries, pineapple chunks, carton of milk
Dinner: Diet Coke, grilled chicken caesar salad (Mcdonald’s), light vinaigrette dressing, an apple pie.

Today:
Breakfast: Sandwich, with pepperjack cheese and turkey with mustard, glass of milk.
Lunch: Frullati sandwich (turkey), with strawberry banana smoothie
Dinner: 2 apple pies, diet coke, part of a piece of grilled chicken, but then I had to clock in and work.

What, exactly, am I doing wrong? I have enough willpower to not eat certain things, but I feel awkward when with groups of people and I order something that sounds ridiculous to them, like any sort of something that isn’t a huge honking steak or entire side of a pig, since I am a Fat Guy™. (6’ 0", 284#).

I don’t want to jump on any sort of bandwagon right now, since I’ll be leaving for Germany in 3 weeks, and I know anything I have going will be destroyed, due to convienience issues/being a foreigner, etc.

However, afterwards, I’m thinking about Atkins. Now that the big hubbub/risks talk has died down, it looks OK, and I saw a documentary on Food Network. (The TV’s always right, you know.) I don’t need carbs at each meal to feel full or satisfied, and it seems breakfast will be the hardest part to bear, considering my cooking senses wake up far after my body. If I do go Atkins, I’m thinking pre-cooking some bacon or something with boiled eggs. Redundancy doesn’t matter much for me when it comes to breakfast, because I usually don’t care what it is. I’m hungry, and my belly wants food :P.

Where I’m moving for college has a gym type thing in the dorms, so that’s covered, and all I plan to do would be light weight training and treadmill… maybe, haven’t quite thought that far ahead yet. Cooking would also be easier b/c I wouldn’t have to worry about making things at multiple friends’ houses, etc. The dorm room has a small kitchen, but it’s enough to do what I’d need to do.

I know that motivation is going to be the key factor, but I know I can give myself a full month of “Dammit, I hate you! I hate you and your… ass face, diet!”, but then comply. It’s just I’d like even some 6-7# loss after the first month that I can say “Hey, that’s good!” continue

I’d like to get something started when I get back from Germany… I’m still in the planning stages right now, but I don’t want to put it off until I go to school. I guess a realistic goal would be to get down to 235 by the end of my freshman year, and hopefully, as long as I can keep this going, 200 by the end of sophomore. After that, it should just be maintenance.

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wow: side note… that’s the longest post I think I’ve ever made.

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What, exactly, am I doing wrong?

Sugar, sugar, and more sugar, along with white flour. You’re not going to lose weight as long as you eat stuff like that unless you want to step up your walking even more. All of those carbs are turning directly to sugar, which becomes fat.

It’s just I’d like even some 6-7# loss after the first month that I can say "Hey, that’s good!"

Sheeyet. You’re a 284 pound guy. Give Atkins a month and I bet you lose 20 lbs. No, really.

Guys lose so quick on Atkins. It’s so friggin’ annoying :slight_smile:

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[QUOTE]
What, exactly, am I doing wrong? I have enough willpower to not eat certain things, but I feel awkward when with groups of people and I order something that sounds ridiculous to them, like any sort of something that isn’t a huge honking steak or entire side of a pig, since I am a Fat Guy™. (6’ 0", 284#).

[QUOTE]

It is possible to eat sugar on a daliy basis and still lose weight. I did it. Back in high school my typical daily diet consisted of pizza at lunch, burger or some other red meat at dinner, and I weighed 170 pounds. After that I decided to limit myself to one high-fat meal every two days, and replace the pizza with sandwiches. I still drink one soda and have one high-sugar dessert a day on average, and I dropped to 145 pounds and stayed there for four years and counting. The recommnedations that I make are:

  1. Whole grain breads, not white. Also whole grain cereals.
  2. High fat meals no more than three times per week.
  3. Low fat milk.
  4. A glass of water with every meal.
  5. Large serving of vegetables at both lunch and dinner.
  6. Avoid between-meal snacks as much as possible.

As for feeling awkward when you order food in groups, I eventually got over that. The plain fact is that most other people pay no attention to what you eat most of the time, it just takes a little getting used to.

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So does fat. Too much of any macronutrient is going to get stored as fat. Unless you eat a small amount every 1.5-2 hours, every times you eat your body stores fat. You don’t really think that all that energy you need for the next 6 hours just circulates around your blood stream do you?

As for other storage methods such as muscle and liver glycogen, sugar works just fine.

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DUDE :cool:

Germany is THE place for Atkins!!!

Ge thee to a grocery store…they sellhard boiled eggs by the dozen…already dyed spiffy colors…and they have the most incredible assorment of premade meat products that you would ever see…

They sell these cute little dried sausages the size of lil smokies that are fantastic, and there is a product called leberkaise that isnt liver at all, it is very finely ground meat [about the fineness you find in bologna] that is eaten in slices like meatloaf, topped with a fried egg and occasionally fried onions. They have toothpaste like tubes of cream cheese mixed with caviar or chopped salmon, that schmeered on wasa rye crispbread is the breakfast of the gods…i had no problem staying on atkins when i was there=)

The most common german breakfast I ran into there was a platter with a selection of hard boiled eggs, little sausages, strawberries, the tubes of cream cheese and caviar, nutella[not on atkins, but used sparingly as a treat on wasa is wonderful] cubes of a local fresh cow cheese[sort of like non stinky feta] kalamata olives, and brie or hard gouda like cheese. It seemed to be a sort of default breakfast/snack assortment. Also they have a very nice vitamin boosted orange juice, and a green tea with cactus fruit that are both killer to have a small glass of with your breakfast coffee.

The packaging tends to be smaller than american sizing, so it is perfect for the single guy, a lot of stuff comes in 200 gram sizes [single hamburger, for comparison purposes] and 200 ml [1 cup more or less] and many things are prepared and packaged ‘shelf safe’ like parmalat milk is in the us.

I am pretty sure my email is in my profile [just add at earthlink dot net to username fwiw] if you have any other questions=)

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What McDonalds pedometers?
I want one!

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Yes, but I won’t be living there… I’ll be staying with a host family for 2 weeks, and then train-riding for a few days.

This pedometer. It’s to the bottom-right of the happy meal box… the little blue thing.

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Still sounds like lots of fun=)

the little sausages in question are called minicabanossi, and sometimes pfefferbeisser. There is no reason you cant grab a few packages and keep them in your pack as atkins safe snacks=) and hardboiled eggs dont need refrigeration if you will be eating them in a day or 2=)

Have fun, take pictures and let us know how things go=)

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Hell, i dont know. i just ran your weight through a few exercise calculators and (assuming you are walking at 3mph) you should be burning around 1000 calories a day from walking those 6 miles. That is assuming a leisurely 3mph walking speed. If what you listed is truly your caloric intake then someone who weight 284 lbs and burns 1000 just by walking should be losing weight and/or inches.

I would try atkins as all the others are recommending.

On another note, how do those pedometers work? Do you just click it with every step or what?

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No, this wasn’t like “Hey, let’s walk for exercise!”, but rather “Hey, let’s clip this to my belt and see how much I walk at work anyway!”.

It works by counting the jar that it gets through walking. (lol, you think McDonald’s customers would hit a button each time they took a step?)

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HAHAHA. ‘this thing works alot better if you just click it while watching tv’.

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I somehow doubt that walking six miles over the course of a day has the same effect as taking a single, long six-mile walk after school. Your heart rate doesn’t go up when you’re just walking a few dozen yards at a time and then resting.

However, you could probably have a great deal of success in losing weight simply by counting calories. I’ve nothing against the Atkins diet, nor anything against people who are taking it, but now that it has caught on as sort of a fad there are a lot of food manufacturers out there providing “low carb” foods that are still diet-breakers. (Face it, it’s easier to redesign the label to say “Now With Lo Carbs!!!” than to actually redesign it so it’s good for you.) Many “low carb” so-called Atkins snacks are extremely high in calories—as high or higher than the carb-packed snacks like tortilla chips—and it’s the calories that count.

The trick of the Atkins diet, or of any diet, is that you are eating fewer calories than you expend. This will result in a net weight loss whether you are cutting out fats, cutting out sugars, cutting out carbs, or cutting out meats. Doesn’t matter. Your alternatives are to burn more calories, or eat fewer.

I started losing weight about a month ago with the very simple system of counting calories and eating low-calorie stomach-filling foods. For lunch I have a bagel with a bit of tuna salad and mustard (about 330 calories), a banana (about 110 calories), one small pack of lunchmeat (120 calories), and a small chocolate chip cookie from the bakery department (70 calories). Sometimes I change it and have chicken salad instead, or an apple rather than a banana. Except on days when I have to buy more tuna salad, this costs me about $2.50 for lunch. Compare that lunch with one Double Whopper with Cheese (1000 calories, not including fries or drink, and much more expensive too).

The apple pie probably isn’t helping your diet. If you instead ate an apple and a banana it would probably fill your stomach just as nicely, for half the calories. Try going here for a calorie calculator; the McDonald’s website says the baked apple pie is about 260 calories. An apple and a banana is only about 180-190. The point is, sugary and fatty foods don’t take up any room in your stomach so you feel hungry much more quickly.

Also, if you insist upon weighing yourself daily, do it at the same time of day (right after you wake up, after you go to the bathroom, right before you get in the shower?) so you’ll have the best day-to-day comparison. Weighing every few days, or every week, might make it easier to see results. Weighing every 20 minutes just makes you frustrated. :slight_smile:

This is kind of a long response, but I hope it’s useful.