It’s been a goal for a while, I’ve always kept half an eye on my weight (am in my third year). Only thing is, when I’d have binges of heavy drinking and eating, I wouldn’t correct for the weight I’d gain. Instead, I’d hover at it. I’d regret going to a friends house where we’d all eat pizza, since I know I’d not compensate.
However, that changed recently when the scales showed 13 stone (182 pounds / 82kg). That frightened me, I remembered a friend’s father saying he’d been 11 stone for his entire adult life. I decided I’d need to actually cut down on what I ate instead of just avoiding typically unhealthy foods. I’ve also been doing this exercise circuit at home every other day.
What’s helped a lot is eating porridge every day for breakfast (I think Americans call them “rolled oats”, apparently “unrolled oats” are even better but harder to prepare). I’ve also switched to cottage cheese and veggie hot dog sandwiches, fruit for snacks and drinking water exclusively (well, I also have alcohol on occasion… sometimes I can’t resist ordering pizza afterwards either :smack:).
Still, it’s a relief that the upward trend has reversed and I’m back down to 160 pounds. Not sure whether I should keep losing weight though… 154 pounds is closer to the middle of healthy in BMI. Opinions?
Oh yeah, perhaps it’s just my palate (or lack of refinement) but I’ve found a renewed appreciation for pistachios and houmous (especially with salad).
I’ve found using 2L water bottes to be really handy if anyone else is seeking to get off juice/soda. It just becomes instinctive to go for water after a while (though I admit the occasional piss-up is probably far worse than a glass of juice a day).
High fat content in food doesn’t translate directly to fat on your hips. It depends on the type of fat. Also, carbs are arguably worse than fat for weight gain because of their low satiety index. Fat fills you up. Carbs leave you hungry again in a very short time.
Eat protein with a side of fat! It’s the best of all.
Well, I buy the low fat versions of houmous at the store. Probably still relatively high in fat compared to other foods, but yeah. I haven’t had pistachios in a while, but they’re pretty good for protein considering I’m a vegetarian. Forgot to mention I can’t do pushups for shit, so I replaced them with bicep curls in the regime.
Today I’d gained a pound since yesterday… I’m not sure whether it was just eating more or actually retaining more, since according to calorie count I’m below the daily equilibrium point.
I understand that, but when I say pistachios are high in fat I mean they’re ~44% fat. That’s ~550 calories per 100g, which is not going to be too helpful if you’re trying to lose weight. For 550 calories you can easily get a whole (and satiating) meal. I’m just pointing out you have to beware of things that might seem like healthy snacks that you can eat loads of (such as nuts and hummus) which are actually quite fatty, not making a specific point about what is bad or good.
Weighing yourself daily isn’t very helpful. A pound can easily be explained by being more hydrated, having more food inside you etc. If you can manage to weight a week I think that’s best. Daily measurements can be disappointing or overly encouraging.
If you can find the motivation to work on your push ups it might help. I’d guess it uses up more calories since it’s a bigger effort, but I don’t know that for sure. It certainly does work more muscles though, and will probably have a great effect on how you look if that’s part of your aim.
I’m vegetarian myself and at the moment I’m trying to both lose fat and gain some muscle. Not to extremes - I basically want to look better but not like I’m trying to look better (and really I’m not trying that hard, it’s closer to what you’re doing than spending hours in gyms). I try to get a lot of protein since firstly it’s a good way to eat enough to not be hungry while keeping a low calorie count (it’s not really an efficient energy source) and also I need it if I want to gain any muscle. So I eat omelettes most days (I take half the yolks out and normally add some cottage cheese, maybe some spinach and nutmeg) and I eat a lot of Quorn too. I’m not sure where you are and if you can get it there, but it’s a good meat substitute - low in fat and high in protein. I also eat a lot of low fat yogurt and cottage cheese (as mentioned), as well as trying to get a good mix of fruit and vegetables. I highly recommend lentil soup too, especially with some cumin in it. Basically I think it’s quite possible to work towards your goals efficiently without having to go hungry or eat bland and boring things. It’s just a shame I like pizza so much…
I disagree. There’s no problem with weighing yourself daily as long as you’re aware that body weight varies with up to a kilo due to hydration, defecation etc. The point is to look for trends, not instantaneous gains/losses.
Since once a week is just as susceptible to random variations as once a day, once a day is just as helpful. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing it every day, every week or every month as long as you’re aware of random variations and use some trending approach rather than looking at single-point measurements. Myself, I check every day, but I don’t look to hard at single-point values. I look at trends, and they’re easier to spot with daily measurements as long as you’re looking at the last week’s trend rather than only at today’s measurement.
Fat is more filling per calorie, though, and satiates you more. I know as someone who lost a lot of weight that 300 calories in something like brown rice is not going to make you feel as satiated as 300 calories in say, pork sausage.
Pork sausage is more energy dense by far, so you can eat a lot more of it in one sitting. However if you understand your portion sizes and only prepare 300 calories worth, eat it, and then wait an hour you’ll feel much more satiated than you would from 300 calories of brown rice.
This isn’t so much about stomach fullness but feelings of satiation which the body goes through. When I lost most of my weight I typically ran a 20/40-60/20-40 plan. Basically 20% calories from fat, 40-60% calories from carbs, and 20-40% calories from protein. (I only ate that much protein on days I lifted weights.) It wasn’t easy to lose weight and I often had cravings and felt hungry. It got better over time, but never truly went away.
One two week period in the middle I basically ran an experiment to try out a type of diet people talk about a lot on the internet and etc. Sort of a mix of the paleo diet and the atkins diet concepts. For two weeks I ate 20-60g of carbs a day and the rest of my calories came from fat and protein. Typically I’d be eating 55-65% of my calories each day in fat. During this two weeks I consumed far fewer calories than at any other point (around 1450), and I felt consistently full. I also had a consistent energy level (on my normal diet I had ups and downs.) I think I could have eaten like that essentially forever without stopping. The reason I stopped is I had concerns about how a diet like that could affect you in terms of cholesterol and etc, but in general a high fat diet to me allowed me to consume far fewer calories without feeling hungry. Like I said though it was an experiment (the ~1450 calories were actually less than I should have been eating, and it wasn’t healthy to eat that low amount.)
It can be if you have discipline. What you do is weigh yourself every day and then run a spreadsheet that calculates a weighted moving average, this will create very valid and real weight loss trend lines you can follow. This is what I did. However I always say this: if you can’t do it scientifically and realize each daily measurement is not very important in and of itself, then don’t do it. Under this approach, daily weight is not really what you care about, it’s just data collection to plug into a formula which gives you your trend which filters the “noise” of daily variable hydration levels and undigested food levels and etc. If you’re someone who psychologically will freak out over the daily variations then don’t do it, because that makes weight loss harder.
How high in protein are you going? I would be very cautious about eating more than 1g / kg of body weight of protein. If you’re a heavy weight lifter you might go as high as 1.5g / kg, extreme body builders sometimes do 2.5g-3.5g / kg, but I’m not convinced that is healthy or desirable.
If you aren’t heavy weight training, aside from the g/kg guideline I’d advise you not consume more than 25-30% of daily calories from protein. If you want a low fat diet and also want to try and build or preserve muscle while losing weight then most of your energy will have to come from carbohydrates.
With what I eat I can make a filling and satiating meal for not much more than 300 calories anyway. I have lost a lot of weight myself doing that. Actually it was very quick and, although I did put a bit back on afterwards, I’m currently below the weight I was when I got to the end of that big weight loss period.
I probably eat 1g/kg at a max, but I don’t really measure it that carefully, I just look at the nutrition information on most things I eat and decide if it’s worth it.
I’m not really trying to gain a lot of muscle, I don’t want it to look unnatural, just the right side of average.
I’d guess I don’t go much over 1/3 of my calories from protein, but I’m not certain. Often I’ll eat a couple of wholemeal tortillas those are around 150-200 calories each. I also normally have cereal with yogurt in the morning just to get some energy (the cereal is dried fruit with a few nuts and wholewheat flakes). That’s both sugar and starch, with some fat from the nuts. I also try to make sure I eat plenty of fruit and vegetables which adds more sugar, and aside from that I eat a lot of low fat yogurt (2% fat so there’s still some) and omelettes with half the yolks removed (fat there too).