This is the part that reveals the meanness of spirit and desire to point fingers - (which can and definitely does come from other fat people, particularly when they have or are dealing with their own weight: “See? I can do it, so you’re just whining.”) since it is entirely invented. How does one arrive at “oh well I tried” from a single thing that I’ve said, especially when I’ve been very clear from the first post that I’m not giving up at all, and giving up wasn’t my point? Well, you make it up so you can judge.
No, Stoid. I don’t agree that this reveals a heart of mean-spiritedness. That evaluation could conceivably be incorrect, but it doesn’t mean that Gleena is being cruel.
Personally, I’ve met a considerable number of people who do say “I’ve tried, and nothing works, so it’s just not worth the effort anymore.” This typically comes from educated people who should know better. Additionally, two weeks is a VERY short period of time. It’s hardly unreasonable for someone to surmise that a person who complains after just two weeks is expecting too much – or worse, giving up too soon.
Again, Gleena’s inference may or may not be correct. That doesn’t make it unreasonable though, and it doesn’t make it mean-spirited. Nor does it rule out the possibility of other factors that could be hindering someone, such as taking an overly drastic approach to dieting.
If you want to think I’m a big meanie and pointing fingers, then by all means, you do that.
I never said you were whining. THAT would be mean spirited. I said what you’re saying can’t be the case. If I missed where you said you weren’t stopping, then I apologise and I encourage you to continue. What you’ve posted though is a whole lot of poor me.
I am saying if you are the size you have claimed to be, if you continue to eat at the level you said you did, you will lose weight unless there is something wrong with you physically. To claim otherwise is BS.
It’s a pretty good analogy, actually. And science is with you on it - it’s actually not “simple” at all. (And I understand very well the difference between simple and easy.) It’s very complex…VERY complex. And you’ve explained it pretty decently: there are a host of factors in play when addressing the issue of obesity, starting with the genes you get in the first instant of life, ranging to how long a life you’ve lived and everything that’s happened and is happening in between. The fact that food is energy that is either burned, excreted, or stored as fat and that eating insufficient amounts to address one’s own energy needs will result in the shedding of both fat (and muscle) is not the beginning and end of it, obviously.
I like analogies, here’s another: we can cure people with certain heart diseases by replacing the heart they have with a different heart. It’s just that simple. And it IS simple. One out, the other in. Of course, every single one of us knows that the cure may be simple, but the successful implementation is incredibly complex, involving multiple factors, starting with finding exactly the right heart from the person who died exactly the right way in the right time and place, to the people, steps, processes, equipment, time, and pain involved in extracting the heart from the one and placing it in the other, as well as a a lifelong need to take immunosuppressant drugs or face death from the rejection of the heart, something which interferes with life every day for the rest of the patient’s life and is a constant shadow over their shoulder.
But the thing itself, one heart out, the other in? It’s very simple.
So saying something is simple isn’t saying anything useful at all, and can be a little insulting.
Two weeks is nothing in terms of dieting, absolutely nothing. I know it feels like forever when you’re in it.
I’ve been doing daily weight tracking and just checked over it. I found two straight weeks where I held to my diet plan and went up in weight pretty much the whole time. Another week the month previous, I pingponged up and down in weight - up 2 lbs one day, down 2 the next, then up 3 the next, then down 2. Plot all those and check the overall trend across the two months, and I lost weight. If I wasn’t checking the overall trend, I’d be kicking myself, but I just gritted my teeth and was determined to stick to the plan and not just give up, or point at those results and say look, it’s not working, I’m eating less and gaining weight.
This is so bizarre on so many levels.
When did you get the news that your experience was the one that defined reality for every other human being alive?
The whole POINT of the thread was to address posts like yours! “Here’s what I experienced, therefore it is what YOU will experience if you do exactly what I do, and if you don’t, you’re lying.”
I think we will have to agree to disagree on this. Personally, I believe that calling someone’s experience nonsense, lies, or exaggeration mean-spirited, but we must have different reference points.
I wish you the best of luck and hope it turns out exactly like you want it to.
Comparing instituting a successful weight loss plan to getting a heart transplant is bizarre, to say the least.
I can understand someone saying that it’s been so difficult for them to stay on a diet and exercise plan and they’ve had so many failures that they no longer consider it worth the effort and pain.
But claiming that one cannot lose weight because of metabolism and the incredible complexity of the weight loss process is (for the vast, vast majority of people) an excuse that is not grounded in reality.
Eat less, exercise more (and according to some studies, get good regular sleep) and virtually everyone will lose weight.
Here is something I posted on Lifehacker, and I think it’s relevant here:
Don’t make “losing weight” your resolution. Why? Because your weight isn’t something that you can affect directly. You can’t take a knife and cut 5 pound off of your body. You can only lose weight by doing other things, so make those things your goal, rather than making the weight loss your goal.
That’s important because your weight is a complex system that is influenced by many things. Some are in your control (what you eat, when you exercise), some are out of your control (your genes will dictate how your weight responds to changes in diet), some things may be something you can control but only to a certain extent - salt, for instance, will make you retain water; however, you can only lose a small amount of weight by eliminating salt, and then you won’t lose any more(btw, this is why so many people “lose ten pounds the first week!!!” on diets. It’s not fat, it’s water weight from eliminating salt). And there are some things that will cause weight gain that you may not have a choice on - like cortisone therapy.
Also, your weight isn’t just fat - it’s fat, muscle, water, blood, bone, and, well, (bluntly) feces. You can lose weight by losing muscle mass, and that is not a good thing.
If you work on “losing weight” and you don’t lose the weight like you thought you would, or hit a plateau, you can get discouraged. But if you set your resolution to “Exercise 3 times a week” and “Eat more vegetables and less fried foods”, then you can look back and see that you were following your resolutions even if the scale isn’t moving.
Some other tidbits I want to add to this:
If you were only going to do one thing to improve your health, you should pick exercise. From the health news that I’ve seen (and that is something I follow), exercise improves damn near every aspect of your life you can think of.
Second runner up is to eat high fiber foods. I don’t see that much in the way of fiber in your diet, and there are quite a number of high-fiber foods, low-cal foods that are tasty. Fiber will not only help you with various weight and health issues, it helps you feel fuller. One of the problems I always have with high-protein diets is that they often ignore starches that have very beneficial fiber profiles, like beans and brown rice.
As was mentioned before, sleep is critical.
I saw a report recently that said that spinach and some other leafy greens improve cell function - this may or may not help you lose weight, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it improved the efficacy of exercise in utilizing calories. Veggies in general are my biggest challenge, and if you’re a supertaster, they may be yours as well. But they can give you more food to eat without adding a lot more calories.
I think the importance of flavor in weight loss is an unexplored area in weight loss. This is purely my own pet theory, but what if flavor influences how you metabolize food? Corporate produced food has not only increased portions and trended towards deep-frying as much as possible, it has also tended to reduce flavor complexity to appeal to the LCD of American tastes. Some flavors are calorie free (herbs and spices), while other such as salsa or small amounts of butter could be helping your weight loss without adding many calories.
I used to hang out a lot a weight loss sites (back when I was losing weight), and these kinds of threads come up all the time, of someone restricting savagely, and still not losing any weight. There was always the same round of discussion, of 'calories in vs. calories out", and starvation mode, and accusations of lying, or at least of making mistakes in calorie counting. I could never resolve what was happening to my own satisfaction, because the maths is simple, but so many people seem to have a different experience where the maths just doesn’t seem to work for them.
Anyway, one thing that did seem to help for quite a few of these people who couldn’t lose weight, was to increase the amount of calories they were taking in. It seems counter-intuitive, but it did seem to help some people. So, if you are supposed to be on 2450 calories to maintain your weight, then try to stick to 2000-2200 calories. A deficit of 250 calories a day will still lose you 1lb every two weeks, which is slow, but better than nothing. And 2000 calories is a lot easier to manage than 1400.
I agree with Weedy. A lot of people seem to get focused on this whole, “I must lose weight now now NOW” thing, and restrict calories to the point that they are starving. That’s ridiculous. Eat a little less than you are spending. Just a little. You’ll lose the weight eventually. Meanwhile work on your fitness level.
I want everyone to know I appreciate the participation and I’m going to respond to a lot of things, but I wanted to jump on this one:
With a true story from many years ago, mid-80’s. I weighed far less than I do now, but I was still decidedly fat. I was going to the gym regularly.
One day, I was feeling particularly evil-eyed by other women in the gym (I made the mistake of attending the sort of gym that is less about a mutually supportive atmosphere of fitness improvement and more about competitive elitist cruising, but I’ve learned my lesson on that score - YMCA all the way!) and bad about my weight and I was all weepy in the locker room.
A very sweet young woman came over to me and asked what was wrong, very sincerely solicitous. Between sobs I explained how I felt so many evil eyed stares from other women. With perfect sincerity and absolutely the best intentions she said: “They’re just scared.”
I blubbered: “Of what? Looking like ME???”
And without missing an oblivious beat she quickly replied with a nod and a sympathetic “uh huh”.
Her well-meant cluelessness was so egregious I have often thought of that moment with nothing other than amusement, and I felt very much the same at the time. Amazing.
I hate to do the “+1” post, but I honestly couldn’t have said it better myself.
Also, Stoid, one month doesn’t prove anything and you could have lost up to 8 pounds even since you are using a wonky scale apparently.
(1) A question: do people with unusually low BMRs get hungry at the same level of caloric deficit as people with higher BMRs? That seems unlikely to me, but seems to be one of the assumptions the OP is making.
(2) I think the OP has a false sense of the precision in these numbers. All of the following are subject to significant errors: your estimated BMR, the sedentary multiplier, your calories burned by exercise, the calories contained in your meals, your measurements of weight, and your week-to-week body composition (both fat/muscle and water). That’s why it’s good not to pay too close attention to the numbers, and to only track broad-scale trends over the long term. It’s not that the numbers don’t matter, but that you can only know them with significant error bars.
(3) Measuring results after two weeks is like judging how much snowfall there will be this storm based on how many snowflakes you can catch in your hand in 30 seconds.
And another blanket remark (detailed later, I have work to do…)
Since I’m talking about me and my experience with obesity, diet and exercise, a couple of other pertinent facts:
First, I have actually learned how to LOVE exercise, as long as I do it in a way to maximize my comfort level, which is primarily about temperature control. There is nothing quite so miserable to me as being hot, and that is the part of exercise that I avoid at all costs.
So, since I am very well-acquainted with the joys of exercise, both in the moment and in the long term, the way I have learned to address it may seem strange, but my motto is whatever works: I have dozens of those special scarves that have water-absorbing beads in them. I soak them, then freeze them. I wrap one around my head and one around my neck.
But I don’t stop there. I take another and shove it under my beasts in my sport bra, and another down my pants! Then I fill a spray-bottle-with-fan and spritz myself.
And after 30 minutes on a treadmill, not only are all of them melted, they are warm!
My issue with exercise is all about time management, which is an enormous issue across the board in my life.
Accidentally hit the wrong button…
Re: Time management. Issue in a million ways (hello, that and impulse control are the core features of ADD and I am a hardcore sufferer) but as far as exercise… if I could suspend time to get my exercise in, I would do it every single day without fail, because I do love it, and I especially love swimming - swimming (and I mean real, doing vigorous laps swimming, not mere splashing around; I wear a snorkel mask so I can keep my head in the water and not worry about how hard I need to breathe) is a reward for me, not a chore. But the time it sucks out of my day is so hard for me, because dealing with time and how not to waste it is always hard for me.
And the SDMB is a huge time suck… ooops. Gotta go. 
Here’s a time tip… you coulda used your iPad to watch 31 hours of “Breaking Bad” while on a treadmill or a bike.
Not trying to be snarky. I love TV a lot. If I didn’t already have my exercise scheduled I’d totally use it as a motivator for exercise too. In fact, my best friend just got himself a treadmill and a Droid phone and is actually sticking to an exercise program thanks to the Droid, a Slingbox and his DVR.
You’re right… but I have to de-hoard my house first. My gym at least.
WARNING: Do not take St. John’s Wort without consulting your doctor, even though it’s just an herbal supplement. For instance, if you’re already on antidepressants, it’s counterindicated! I used to take St. John’s Wort and had a wonderful experience with it, so I’m not against its use. You just need to make an informed decision as to whether it’s right for you or not.
* Research shows that St John's wort interacts with some drugs. The herb affects the way the body processes or breaks down many drugs; in some cases, it may speed or slow a drug's breakdown. Drugs that can be affected include:
o Indinavir and possibly other drugs used to control HIV infection
o Irinotecan and possibly other drugs used to treat cancer
o Cyclosporine, which prevents the body from rejecting transplanted organs
o Digoxin, which strengthens heart muscle contractions
o Warfarin and related anticoagulants
o Birth control pills
o Antidepressants
So long as I’m here, I may as well weigh in (no pun intended). Some things I learned from my nutritionist:
It’s not just about the number of calories, or what foods those calories come from, but when you take in those calories. You should be eating 3 small meals a day and 2 snacks. Your snacks should be one protein and one fruit. If your mid-morning snack is a protein, your late-afternoon snack should be a fruit and vice-versa. Have those snacks whether you’re hungry or not. If you skip that snack, you’ll get hungry before your next meal, which makes you more likely to overeat during that meal.
Also what this does is maintain your metabolism at a more constant rate throughout the day so you don’t have peaks and crashes. I find when I eat like this, I’m never hungry. Ever. It’s so much nicer a feeling!
As regards exercising; timing can also be everything. Your muscles are the most flexible, agile and have the most stamina in the late afternoon. Your body even uses oxygen more efficiently in the afternoon. Because of these factors, you’ll get a better workout with less perceived effort (which will probably mean less sweating for you!) if you choose this time of day to exercise.
But. . . studies have also shown that 90% of people who get up and exercise first thing in the morning are more likely to keep it up consistently. So figure out which one works best for your personal program. You may find that the time of day you exercise will affect your weight loss, even if you’d be doing the same exercise no matter which time you did it.
Try adding some vitamin supplements that are metabolism boosters, glucose regulators and/or fat burners (as above, always talk to your doctor first!); Biotin, Vitamin B[sub]6[/sub], B[sub]12[/sub] and chromium polynicotinate. Also good to take, astaxanthin.
Try incorporating these modest additions (spread your calories out more throughout the day, choose the right time of day to exercise and add some vitamins) to what you’re already doing and see if it makes a difference.
Wishing you all the best, girlfriend!