Quick background. I am 5’11" and have been happy and decent-looking at about 160 lbs since high school. I’m now 32.
Around 24, my metabolism started to slow down, and I realized I could no longer eat like a total hog. I lost rather easily the weight I had gained, and keeping it off was not a problem until I got married at age 29 in 2000.
Now, having a wife that cooks like a gourmet chef and living in a country, Japan, where great food is cheap and abundant caused me to gain weight rather rapidly. I’ve ranged from the high 160s to a max of 180 since then, and it’s been torture trying to keep it off ever since.
I succeeded in February of last year and got down to about 162 or so. I did this by:
Not drinking alcohol.
Skipping meals.
Feeling super hungry day after day for about two months.
I used no pills or remedies and exercised at about the rate I do now, which is considerable.
Well, I gained it all back, but it took about 6 months. Recently, however, it seems that my metabolism has gone just nuts. I skip lunch, eat not so much overall, and usually do a brisk walk for 40 minutes every day as part of my commute home. I’m now pushing 180 again, and it seems as though literal starvation is the only way to get it off.
Got any ideas? I think doing the Atkins thing in this Land of Carbohydrates (white rice, anyone?) is out of the question, although I already try to keep carb intake at a pretty reasonable level.
I’m no dietician, but the one big booboo that stands out to me is that you’re skipping meals. That’s the easiest way to keep/put weight on.
Your body goes into some emergency kind of status, thinking it’s starving to death. So when you eat, it’s scared that it will never get food again. So it stores it, instead of burning it. Your metabolism slows right down, to protect you from burning too much energy. Try to eat 6 (smaller) meals a day. And remember the water, lots of water, to flush out the nasty stuff.
You know, I always hear this from the experts and I’m sure it’s true, but the only way I can keep my weight manageable is to skip breakfast. When I eat in the morning I find that I am ravenous all day. When I skip it I find I can better manage my hunger.
Anyways, IANADietician either, but as a successful dieter I have to say that the thing that works the best for me is to constantly be aware of the caloric content of everything I eat. I know, it’s pretty boring, but all diets that work, work because they restrict your calorie intake. The important part is that once you’ve reached your goal weight you have to readjust your caloric intake to maintain and you have to keep counting those calories. The diet is never truly over in the sense that you can’t just let your body tell you when you’re full…you have to let your calorie calculator do that for you.
We all know that everyone’s body is different. If 10 people do the same diet, it is quite possible that all 10 will have a different weight loss experience.
I found that “eating for your metabolism” is aimed at an individual’s own body type and is a proven diet/weight management program. You can find information about “eating for your metabolism” at Provida.com. Michael Thurmond created a “6-week body makeover program” to get you started on the “eating for your metabolism” lifestyle…but it’s not just a 6 week “diet” plan. Check into it if you’re interested. I’ve done it (and so have many of my friends) and I lost 30 lbs. in 6 weeks. You can go off and on it, modify it to fit your desires (like keeping on the regimen during the week and then treating yourself to a “no worries” weekend and eating as you please). However, I found that if you modify it or go off, your body actually feels the effects of eating healthily and then going back to the junk.
I hope you find something that works for you and makes you happy.
Do you know what your body fat percentage is? There are some ways of checking yourself, but any good gym or fitness club will be able to check for you. IMO, weight shouldn’t be your concern so much as your body fat. (Average is about 15-17%) I weigh quite a bit, but since my bfp is low, it doesn’t matter. And its fairly easy, in a technical sense, to achieve that: Weight train. More muscle=more energy being burned=goodness!
-Rather than skip meals, eat a small meal every couple of hours. A healthy small meal. A salad, a chicken breast, some fruit (not all at one meal!), etc.
-I am no fan of ‘Atkins’ (aka ‘The Show Diet’, that bodybuilders used to go on during the months before a show.) I am a fan of a well-balanced diet.
-Cardio (walking) is good, but IMO (and to repeat myself), weight-training is essential to maintaining a good physique. If you have x muscle mass, you will burn y energy. If you have x+1 muscle mass, you will burn y+1 energy. Oversimplified, but that basic principle seems to work for me.
I agree. I’ve never been a fan of diets, unless you subsist on doughnuts and chocolate bars. If you eat a fairly balanced diet, I see no reason to change it. I’m trying to lose weight right now, and the closest I’ll come to a diet is replace my normal drink of iced tea with crystal light. I’m cutting like 400 calories a day by just doing that. And to burn some other calories, I do yoga and lift weights. I really hate cardio, so I only walk once a week. And I listen to a book on tape while I do it, so it’s more interesting.
Gotta lift weights, hon. Put on some muscle and you’ll burn more calories just sitting around, and thus you’ll be able to get away with what you’re eating.
When you get up in the morning take care of the daily ‘chores’.
Weigh on accurate scales and record weight.
Plot weight on a graph.
Plan to loose 1 pound per week.
If weight is below the line eat a LITTLE bit more.
If weight is above the line eat a bit less.
Eat regularly.
Eat conservatively, i.e. neither too much or too little.
Exercise 15 to 20 minutes daily to get the heart rate up.
Not a good idea to skip meals or go on an Atkins type diet.
Keep up the exercise and eat low GI foods (dont eat processed carbs) and avoid saturated fat.
Get your wife to cook a low GI rice like Basmati.
Breakfast is important - you need it for your brain to operate properly. Again have a low GI breakfast that will provide a sustained release of energy till lunch, rathjer than a glucose spike that you get with processed cereals.
Diet & quick just do not go together (except in TV infomercials or spam emails).
If you try to lose weight quick, you will almost always fail.
You need to change your lifestyle in a manner that you can maintain permanantly, and which:
reduces the amount of food your eat (but without leaving you constantly feeling hungry), and
increases the amount of energy you burn (without forcing you to do boring exercises). And the 2nd item is probably more important than the first.
To be realistic, plan that it will take you as long to lose the excess weight as it took you to gain it. So it took you from age 29 to age 32 to gain it; it will take you 3 years to lose it (in a way that will keep it lost). You can go on a starvation diet and lose it in a few months, but as soon as you stop starving yourself, you will gain it all back (usually with interest)!
One thing I have observed in the many, many diets I’ve been on, it that the bottom line is maintaining the loss, which I’ve never been able to do. I’ve lost weight slow and I’ve lost it fast. I’ve build up muscle mass and ended up an obese, but muscular person. How to lose is personal, but not gaining it back is the trick. From several documentaries I’ve seen on Discovery channel, etc. those people who are successful keeping it off count every calorie and do strenuous (hard cardio and weight training) exercise. I have found that not eating any high glycemic carbs keeps me from feeling like I’m starving all the time, which I did on your regular “low calorie” regime. You could try the DASH diet. I’ts heart healthy and to lose weight you just leave out bread and nuts (substitute seeds like sesame). I wish you luck, but the odds you will ever keep it off are miniscule. Only 1% of people who lose weight keep it off. BUT, maybe you will be the one. It doesn’t sound like you are a genetic fatty.
As a health guru: I recommend this month’s Discover Magazine.
If you are willing to listen to the advice here, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind hearing some actual scientific findings from Harvard which follow hundred’s of thousands of people for many years.
From your experiences so far, you should have drawn this conclusion: you want to eat, lose weight and maintain it, and remain healthy.
Losing weight is easy. It really is. It’s the maintaining part and the health part that are tricky.
As people have said, the real trick is finding ways to change your lifestyle that you can continue to do forever. So keep trying different things, and drop the ones that you find too annoying or frustrating to continue.
Here are some that I have found.
Exercising more:
don’t look for the closest parking space in the lot, but one far away. Make a game of looking for one with no other car parked within 2 spots on any side. (That also saves you a lot of dings on your car.)
use the stairs instead of elevators/escalators. Set your own rules about how far you will go on the stairs. Like 2 flights up & 3 down; anything farther use the elevator.
don’t catch the bus at the stop right in front of your building, but walk a block or 2 down the route and catch the bus at an earlier stop. (You’ll also get a better seat that way during rush hour.)
Get off the bus a block earlier or later than the one nearest your home, and walk an extra block thru the neighborhood, checking out what’s happening there.
instead of going to the nearest restroom, walk further to one on the other side of the building.
Eating less (or less calories):
Best done when buying groceries. Don’t buy the snack things that destroy your diet; if they aren’t in your house they can’t tempt you.
substitute hard, sucking type candy (peppermints, butterscotch drops) that takes longer to eat for quickly chewed & eaten candy (like chocolate kisses, M&M’s, etc.) [Diet plans say to stop eating candy entirely. I think that is pretty unrealistic for most people, and a reason diets fail for most people.]
substitute things like pretzels for potato chips.
eat unshelled peanuts or pistachio nuts instead of shelled or dry-roasted nuts. The extra time spent shelling them results in you eating fewer nuts.
keep healthier snacks available in your refrigerator. Like baby carrots. Or make up a bunch of celery sticks filled with peanut butter or cream cheese, and keep them in a plastic container in the fridge. And keep the healthy stuff prominent, out in the open, while the other snacks are hidden in the back.
try to eat foods with some food value. So when you get hungry for something sweet, have a can of pineapple chunks in the fridge. Or apples, or oranges, rasins, dried apricots, etc. Try to go for these instead of candy or ice cream. If you want something salty, try a slice of toast with melted peanut butter, instead of potato chips or honey-roasted nuts.
when eating chips or veggies with dip, heat up the dip in the microwave first. It gets runny, and so you eat less of the dip than if you were scooping it up. Also, plain sour cream can substitute for pre-made (high calorie) dips (usually cheaper too).
The key here is that these are the kind of minor changes in your daily routine, or slight substitutions in the food you eat. Ones that you can do without feeling real pained about it, and can expect to continue doing for a long time. Giving up candy altogether would be too painful for me to realistically do, but substituting a butterscotch drop for chocolates is OK. Even a good feeling, that I’m ‘suffering’ a bit, trying to be good.
You need to choose specific things that work for you. Ones that you can plan on keeping up with for a long time. Resolutions like “I’m going to spend 2 hours in the gym every night” won’t work – you probably don’t have 2 extra hours to spend there, and you’ll soon find reasons not to do that. But using stairs instead of elevators every day at work – easy to do, and it will make a difference over time.
That’s something I did. I quit that blood-pressure raising ordeal of looking for a spot right by the door and just parked farther out where there were lots of empty spots. No worry about dings, and I was able to just park right away and get inside. Besides, what are you going to do when you get inside the mall or the store, anyway? More walking! My kids questioned it at first (and whined a bit: “Why do we have to walk all that wayyyyy?”), but now they’re used to it.
Watch the other cars circling for that one close spot and you’ll realize that you get inside faster than they do.
Yogini