This is crazy. I know plenty of fat or overweight people, but I’ve never had one tell me that s/he just can’t lose weight.
They all say things like “I need to start dragging my fat ass around the park”, or “Damn, I need to go ahead and start that $@&#ing diet next week.”
I’m not saying anything about needing to respond to bitching about ones weight with hugs. Not one bit.
Just that you got out quite a broad brush with your statement about food journals using phrases like “never, ever, ever” and it just made me curious as to just how many of these fat people you run in to to be such an authority on the subject of how overweight people feel about their food journals. And then I wonder why you feel you have the right advice for all of them. All 100 of them.
Right. Unwillingness to catalogue your caloric intake signifies to me an unwillingness to do anything about the problem. Complaining about how hard the lifestyle adjustments are is fine, we all complain about things that are hard for us, but you don’t get to complain about something you’re not doing. If you say to me the lifestyle changes you’re making are hard, then okay, but if it turns out you’re opposed to taking an honest (indeed the key word here) inventory of daily consumption at all, I feel like I just heard the record needle scratch. What the? Why can’t you just log what you’re eating? I’m not asking to see it and grade it and make a fucking billboard out of it to post over the 101 freeway; I’m telling you doing so will likely be very illuminating for you and assist with the problem you “can’t” solve, but you’re entirely unwilling to do it? Yeah, then you’re not serious, and you should probably shut the fuck up.
You need to meet more dumb fat people.
Thanks, I’m good.
That better have been one Really Big Cookie!!!
I want a hug from MeanOldLady.
{{{Loach}}}
I’ve had dozens of conversations regarding budgeting that are the same. I have a reputation for being “good with money” and so friends ask me to help them get their budgets under control. Writing down everything you spend is the first step I give them, and I don’t think anyone has ever followed through. Now, I don’t chase them - when it comes to money and friends (or frankly, weight and friends) I give general advice and then don’t want to get too involved, but I don’t get the feeling many of them follow through. Certainly, very few of them choose to solve their long term issues since most of them ask the same questions a year later.
And mixed in the herd are some cattle who taunt the overweight ones and treat them like shit. From Bob and Joe’s control board they can see this keeps the overweight cattle out of gyms, undermines community support of genuine weight loss efforts, and makes it more difficult to implement actual policy to address the issues. The taunting cattle don’t gain anything from bullying the other cattle, it doesn’t burn calories or make them more fit mates, but it’s persistent behavior, so they turn it over to Frank and John on the sociology control board and let them figure out how to end the bullying. In the meantime Frank and John not getting the mean cattle under control makes Bob and Joe’s job much harder by reinforcing the stereotypes that overweight cattle deserve scorn, ostracism, and are sub-bovine. Depression and anxiety become comorbid factors with the obesity in the cows and make effective policies far more difficult to craft and implement. The overweight cows think they don’t deserve to have anyone take their health struggles seriously and don’t participate in the public health initiatives, and the taunting cows take the continued failure as validation that the overweight cows are defective and undeserving of any consideration. The cycle continues.
Enjoy,
Steven
Okay, no. I realize you’re trying to be helpful, but you misunderstood.
I’ve kept food diaries. When I’m actively trying to lose weight, I track every single calorie using the SparkPeople tracker. I stay within my calorie range. I lose weight. I am capable of doing this for months on a consistent basis (my record is four months, in which I vowed not to gain weight over Thanksgiving and Christmas - and seriously came back from Christmas vacation lighter than when I started.) As I have mentioned before, I have permanently changed my cooking habits. I don’t cook unhealthy things in this house. Lean meat, whole grains, quinoa, beans, vegetables, fruits. The problem is in addition to this there is ice cream, cookies, candy. It’s the snacking that gets me.
So you’re kind of misrepresenting what I said. I said I could lose weight just fine, the problem was maintaining weight loss.* The problem is making these habits permanent.
The reason I have decided to ban sweets in my home is because the temptation is really one of the reasons I get derailed and gain the weight back in the first place. But in the past I have believed, ‘‘oh, I just won’t eat too much of it.’’ And at first, I don’t. But eventually, I do eat too much of it. In that instant I decide that eating healthy really isn’t all that important. I rationalize the hell out of eating sweets. I have actually driven to the store just for cookies, on the basis that it will make me feel better. I stop tracking calories, then I regain the weight.
Every time I start over again, I try to figure out how I derailed and completely alter my environment in order to avoid that thing happening again. So this is really just one of a great deal of changes I have attempted in the past. The reason I believe it will be more successful is because it will just take the temptation out of the equation. It’s also a pretty straightforward rule to follow… I can’t think of anything more clear and simple than No Sweets.
*Okay, technically I permanently lost 30 pounds… six years ago I weighed 210. All I really did was learn to cook. I just don’t count that because I attribute most of it to going off a particular medication.
But that’s unpossible! I’ve brought this up many times in debates over why people gain and can’t lose weight, and been told that calorie counting is a red herring and will not be successful in helping people lose nor keep weight off. This is despite me providing several citations as to the abyssmal calorie-counting and food-tracking ability of the average person.
So I ask you…why must you turn the BBQ Pit into a den of lies??? 
Seriously, yeah, I’ve done the same thing and people categorically refuse to track their calories. They oppositional-defiantly refuse to do it. To me this indicates either a psychological or an educational problem.
When I tried it for a week, I was shocked to discover I was eating 2x the calories I thought I was. I estimated I was eating 900-1,000, and in reality it was very close to 2,000 a day. So I dropped it down to an honest 1,500. Which was good and kept me going for some time at about 126-130 pounds, until I got the tumor, and then my weight shot up again. 
I’m at 137 and desperately clawing my way back, but my calorie spreadsheet says I’m eating an average of 1,220 a day for…about 4 weeks now, and the weight will not come down. I just can’t go any lower without feeling miserable all day, and I’m doing 10 hours of hard exercise each week. 
By the way, back in 2006, my idea of a quick lunch was a block of cheese and a can of Pepsi. And sometimes that is all I would eat that day. I still eat cheese, just in 1-2oz portions. I can’t even remember the last time I cooked something unhealthy. So at least give some credit where it’s due.
Hang in there Una. Every day you do the best thing for your health is a day you did the best thing for your health and no matter what the scale says, you feel it in thousands of other little ways. Plateaus suck, but even when you’re on one, you’re still moving forward and that’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Enjoy,
Steven
It sounds like your metabolism may be in “starvation mode”; holding on to each calorie for dear life. When you limit your calories in such a drastic way (and 1200 is drastic), your body thinks it’s being starved (it doesn’t know the difference between starvation and ‘dieting’). So it slows down calorie-burning in order to better utlilize what it does get. Give yourself a once-a-week “cheat” meal.
Eat anything you want for one meal only one time a week. This helps keep your metabolism on track as well as keeping those miserable blues at bay.
Thank you both. I’m staying the course; my coincident health problems are more the source of depression than my weight, but the weight is really in exactly the wrong place, and that’s what’s making me blue about it. I bought a new skirt months ago I really want to wear and it’s just not happening until I get back to 130. I was a size 2-4, and now am…well…I guess 8; it varies depending on water retention, time of day, etc. Eight is probably an average. 
Because I’m an awful human being who wants to crush all hopes of weight loss with my string of horrible untruths.
But seriously, how did I get suckered into another weight loss thread? :smack:
Hey MeanOldLady! I love your and Ambivalid’s suggestion of keeping a food log. But what about people like me who live on a boat and have no idea what the cooks are putting in my food. The vegetables always seem to be soaking in a pool of butter. Everything is fried and covered in cream sauce. The salads are always Caeser. Etc.
So unfair!! (I’m not overweight, but when I’m out here for 28 days at a time it is STRUGGLE not to put on weight, as evidenced by nearly all my coworkers)
As far as the food diary goes, I remember reading (sorry, no cite) about a group of people who wanted to lose weight. The program was, for thirty days they were told to eat what ever they wanted, just write down what it was.
Then they were put into a controlled environment (college dorms, I believe) for thirty days and fed exactly what they had written down. They lost something like thirty pounds apiece.
People don’t realize how easy it is to eat. With the huge explosion in prepared foods, and TV/the Internet, it is damn easy to log onto Facebook and put away three hundred calories.
Regards,
Shodan
Una,
I am sorry to hear about your having a tumor but relieved to hear that that part of things is going well.
For clarification, my position about the most people’s (obese and thin alike) poor ability to calorie count remains that such is not a cause of rising obesity rates nor of individual obesity. (It is not something that has changed from the 60s to the 90s and not something that the obese are necessarily any poorer at than are the thin.) I do not dispute that accurate calorie counting can be an important part of a plan to lose weight.
The fact is that what you are experiencing is common:
And also the motivation you have, reasons of vanity rather than health:
Mind you there is nothing wrong with wanting to look good and to wear certain clothes.
Of course you are not saying it is impossible for you to lose the additional weight. OTOH if someone came along and told you that it is impossible for you to be eating only 1220 calories a day and not be losing weight since baseline for an inactive person your size would be about 1600 and for a very active woman like you would be 2200 (according to a wide variety of online tools such the Mayo calorie estimator), so therefore you must be running 1000 calories a day as a deficit and should be losing 2 pounds a week, you’d likely get pretty damn pissed. And rightly so.
What you are providing is evidence of is how difficult it can be and why. Sure it is in one sense “simple”: you could lose more weight by further reducing your intake and further increasing your exercise. But calling that “simple” glosses over the complex processes that make it anything but easy. Even after only a short term period of excess adiposity your body is fighting against further weight loss. It is lowering the rate that it burns calories over a 24 hour period. It is triggering brain centers that increase the misery you experience with any further calorie reduction. Knowing your calorie intake does not alter those facts.
But as Steven points out:
Even if the scale never moved any further down. Fitting in that dress, hitting some arbitrary magic number, seem to me to be more superficial goals, compared to the health and fitness you are achieving by doing what you are doing.
Which does not mean that there is not another side to the dreaded plateau … there is. At some point as you stick with it (and of course you will) the body suddenly gives in and identifies a new set point a several pounds lower and a bunch comes off sometimes pretty quickly.
You’ll be wearing that dress. And I’d be surprised if it does not happen very suddenly when it does.
But if it is this difficult for you - very active, excellent calorie counting skills, lots of discipline, relatively a short period of time overweight - imagine what happens to those whose set points are much stickier having been there for much much longer.
Always possible, but only “simple” from the most superficial level of analysis.
Thank you. It’s difficult some days.
Sure, the last I recall you and I were in full agreement on all this.
It is vanity, I freely admit that.
I just don’t understand it. I even count the calories in every Altoid I eat, in the lemon wedge on my Diet Coke (which I eat, I mean), etc. I have scales, and I weigh things. I will say however that although I’m working out so much, my energy level when I’m not exercising is way down, and even exercise now requires a substantial warm-up time. And then I have bursts of energy for a day or so. I’m freezing all the time at work and have a space heater running continuously on full blast there, and I’m not really comfortable now unless it’s nearly 85 in the house. Something is seriously messed up with my metabolism, and the MRI tells me what it most likely is. It’s probably having mood effects on me as well; it would have to, I suppose, but being the subject it’s difficult to judge as the observer.
I agree with you 100%.
Being lower weight will help my mental well-being, even if not my physical. I’m having a lot of problems with my body right now and how it’s acting. So it’s both superficial and it isn’t.
I hope my goal is not unreasonable. I was 126-130 for a very long time and until “everything changed” I was happy with my weight, if not my appearance. Now I feel strange and sad and depressed when I see a closet full of many clothes, some bought as recently as March, which I can’t wear. I’ve lost some of the weight so at least I didn’t need to shop for a whole new wardrobe (while I adore shopping, I also detest wasting money).
Calorie counting is just one tool; it’s data you can use to help find a solution. It tells me that my body is seriously fucked up and that until the doctors figure out what is going on, all bets may be off.