One of the things that I’ve really internalized from my brief foray into Weight Watchers was the idea that you should eat when you’re just a little bit hungry, and you should stop eating when you’re just a little bit full. I.e., don’t wait until you’re starving to eat (but neither should you eat when you’re not hungry at all), and don’t stuff yourself until you’re bursting at the seams, either. They used a numerical scale, with 1 being “completely starving/ravenous” and 10 being “painfully, grotesquely full” (I may have this backwards). The idea is to eat when you’re around a 4 and stop eating when you’re around a 6-7 or so.
How many calories were you eating before, and how fast were you gaining weight? If eating 1388/day only serves to sustain your weight, I assume that you must have been steadily gaining weight while eating much less than 3000 calories a day.
Again, this neglects individual perceptions of satiety. I suspect many people are like me in that they easily detect the early stages of hunger, but the sensation of being “a little bit full” lags well behind the act of having eaten too much.
It’s also useless to people like me, who would rather go all day without eating because they know that, once started, there’s no stopping. Not a good approach, I agree, but it’s something I’ve struggled for decades to overcome.
Pretty much. Even waiting 5 or 10 minutes to decide whether to eat more can do the trick. Again, not implying this is always easy or equally easy for everyone, but there are ways to work around these obstacles. Sometimes it requires a lot of creativity and rearranging of your environment - but hey, whatever works.
Were you getting any kind of exercise while this was happening? Improving your health pretty much requires it.
That part of the equation is true. If the calories you’re taking in are enough to increase your weight, then you need to create a calorie deficit, the best way to do that is low impact exercise. (Running would be counter productive as the impact load to your knees would effectively undo what you’re trying to do: Make yourself healthier.)
I have to side with Stoid on the “no weight loss surgery” thing. Not that I think weight loss surgery is in any way a bad thing; my mother had it 3 years ago, lost half her body weight, and it’s given her her life back. I wish she’d done it years ago. But it’s not a blanket solution, not by a long shot, and anyone who claims it’s easy and requires no effort or willpower is absolutely full of shit.
She’ll be on a buttload of supplements till the day she dies, things to replace the nutrients found in stuff like greens she physically can’t digest any more. Multivitamins, plus additional calcium, iron, and B12, fiber…plus the acid reducers so she doesn’t vomit so much. Oy, the vomiting. She barfed (technically regurg, rather than vomit) all the goddamn time the first 6 months or so. That’s tapered off, but she still takes spells where she’ll go 2-3 days barfing up bile every few hours until she finally brings up something she ate the day before it all started, still in recognizable form.
And now that her stomach is roughly a normal size and she can eat a wider range of foods than she could the first year after the surgery…she’s having to watch and monitor and exert willpower to keep from gaining the weight back. In fact, she gained 10 pounds between August and January and is currently working to take that off. How’d she gain weight with a gastric bypass, you ask? Same way she gained weight before the gastric bypass–eating a little too much of this and that here and there.
Yes. The hormone leptin (produced by fat cells and some parts of the digestive tract, taken up by the parts of the brain that control metabolism, hunger, and energy expenditure) has much to do with our ability to feel satisfied, the speed at which is happens while eating, and the amount of energy we burn. For someone like me, who seems to be highly sensitive to leptin’s effects, this means I have to push myself to eat more than I am naturally inclined (because I work out a lot and because I want to put on some weight), but overeating leads to very high energy levels (non-stop fidgeting, desire to do all kinds of active things) and noticeably increased feeling of warmth, heat coming off my skin, and sweating.
Some studies have found that obese people have unusually high circulating levels of leptin; the theory is that they are ‘leptin resistant’ in the same way many type 2 diabetics are ‘insulin resistant’. This leads to a delay in or inability to feel full, compared to metabolically normal people. It also leads to eating more, and moving less - not through gluttony and laziness, but through brain function.
The more we learn about the brain and the metabolism, the more clear it becomes that these things are regulated on a chemical level, rather than being a matter of ‘willpower’. Skinny people are often vastly different from obese people at a metabolic level, not just a behavioral one - and the first might be the cause of the second.
The more recently discovered hormone ghrelin (‘the hunger hormone’) has been found to govern/stimulate the feeling of hunger. It rises before you eat, and falls afterwards. The parts of the brain that are sensitive to ghrelin are also sensitive to leptin and insulin (both of which also play a part in regulating the amount of body fat you have), the implications I’m not quite sure of… perhaps if you are leptin-resistant, these neurons take in a lot more ghrelin, leading to increased hunger without being satisfied? Circulating levels of ghrelin have been found to be lower in obese people, and while normal weight people have predictable rises and falls in it’s production, this hasn’t been found in obese people.
Lack of sleep leads to higher ghrelin production and lowered leptin production. There is a theory that poor sleep is an important contributing factor to gaining extra body fat.
Weight loss surgery also leads to much-lowered ghrelin levels (it’s produced mostly by the stomach after all).
I hope that was a decent explanation… My main point is that it’s all much more complicated than most people seem to assume! Most of this hormonal metabolic regulating is taking place in our hypothalamus, part of our ‘lizard brain’, one of the oldest organs in evolutionary terms and very similar in all animals. There is very little the less ‘primitive’ parts of our brain can do to override what is happening in the hypothalamus, much less the production of these important hormones by other cells in our body.
My personal experience, and I am well aware that this is only my personal experience, is that when I’ve been consistently overeating for a long time, my hunger cues are messed up or nonexistent, i.e. I can eat and eat and eat and never get that “I’m pleasantly full” sensation - I blow right past that straight to “Oh dear God, I’m stuffed and if I eat another bite I will literally explode.”
However, after a few weeks of monitoring caloric intake at a more normal level and enforcing normal portion sizes on myself, it’s like my body re-learns hunger cues, and at that point I do get the sensation of, “Ah, I am appropriately full now and should stop eating.” But, and again I stress that this is my personal experience, it only seems to take a few meals’ worth of overeating before I lose that innate gauge again.
Just a couple questions that I do not think I have seen asked in this thread: Exactly how much do you think you should have lost after one month? How long did you think it would take for you to start showing weight loss?
This is how it works for me too. If I’m eating crap, fast food, etc., I am always hungry. If I start eating healthier, lean meats, fruits and veg, water or tea only, I find myself eating less.
Stoid, if you are not losing weight, you need to stack your calories differently. Let’s say you can eat 1,800 calories a day. Eat 2,500 one day, 1,100 another day, and keep your body guessing. Make your weekly intake add up to 1,800 x 7, but vary the amount consumed each day.
Same thing with exercise. Hit the gym 5 days a week, but do fat burning mode, up and down. Don’t run for an hour, run for 10 minutes, switch to fast paced walking for 10 minutes, almost jog for another 10 minutes, run for 5, walk normally for another 5, etc. Keep your body guessing.
Whatever you do on a steady basis, your body adapts. That’s why there are fat people who live on 1,000 calories a day. It’s because their body adapted to starvation mode.
If you keep switching directions on your body, from day to day, it will constantly be kicking your metabolism into gear.
I eat a mostly vegetarian, relatively high carb diet, and I do fine, as do most of my coworkers and a great deal of my friends. I currently work with people who mostly eat rice and beans and they are all thin and healthy. Humans have been eating processed grains longer than we’ve been eating dairy products, yet some of us have evolved to better process dairy. Based on my own experience, my anthropological knowledge, and what I’ve observed in other people, I’d never try one of those high protein diets. I don’t need to. If they work for you, then they work for you, but it’s perfectly possible to be extremely healthy on a vegetarian diet and lose weight.
The key for me (and most of my thin coworkers and friends) is exercise. Eat whatever you damn want, then work it off. I’ve not owned a car in many years, and I picked living spaces where I would be forced to bike/walk to work. I currently work a very physically intense job, which helps with keeping in shape, but outside of work, I enjoy physical activities like strenuous hiking. When I start sitting around, then I start gaining weight.
We also keep our portion sizes small, we eat a lot of the same foods day-to-day, and spread the meals out over time. I find that snacking words wonders with controlling the amount of food I’m eating, and also helps me feel more satiated throughout the day.
Unfortunately, my internet is super slow, but I recall that a man made a video response to SuperSize Me in which he ate the same diet but exercised it off. IIRC, he actually lost weight and gained muscle.
I’m not certain, but having measured and monitored so closely, I would estimate that my average calories per day was 2200. Some days 3000, some days 1400, but my eating habits are relatively steady and that’s about where I would fall most of the time. I would just tend to eat virtually all of it within a couple of hours at night, which is not good. Hard habit to change.