I’m sure that’s very realistic since modern beef (241 calories, 17 grams of fat) is so nutrionally similar to wild game such as venison(128 calories, 2 grams of fat)
Like coffee and chocolate?
Well shoot. Lets just stop eatin’.
Yeah… all the people I know with nutrition degrees are overweight.
However I’m more inclined to think that the information they are basing their lifestyles on is fundamentally unsound (healthy whole grains! 250g of carbohydrate per day!!), rather than that every single one of them is living an ‘unhealthy lifestyle’ leading to to much body fat.
If you don’t want to be slim, my best advice to you is to stop thinking about calories anymore. Consider heart and bone health and that’s all. For this you will need to exercise and you will need to make some changes in your food but it will all be much easier to do, and much easier to customize. Start thinking about food as protein, carbs and fats and not calories. Think about your cholesterol levels and your salt intake. DO use decadent and “worth it” food as a reward for exercising.
This calorie shit is not for you.
Also note that the cited portion for beef is 50% larger than that of venison. Even adjusting for that, venison comes out leaner, but not quite as well as presented.
In case anyone is curious about the Gary Taubes book Good Calories Bad Calories, be assured that it’s not a diet book. He’s a science journalist who spent many years re-analyzing data from every reputable nutrition/diet study he could find going back many decades to look for clues as to why we have become so obese. His findings were that in many cases, the purported results of the studies weren’t supported by the evidence of the studies. Fore example, government recommendations to eat lowfat food for better health were never borne out by studies, but seemed intuitive, so it seemed better to be safe than sorry. His book is simply a reporting of what is known and not known, and how studies must be designed to get accurate results. The endnotes in the hardcover book are about 100 pages. He has no agenda to sell diet schemes or products.
My mom’s been on a diet for over a decade that not only works, but it’s easy to stick to. She follows one rule: Every day, she eats at least ten servings of fruits and vegetables, and whatever else she wants. It’s certainly not the quickest diet, but it gets there eventually, and you can stay on it pretty much indefinitely.
That’s even more disturbing!
It all matters. The calories matter, the foods that compose the calories matter (eating 1200 calories a day of candy bars is a fast track to an early grave for sure), the time of day and overall frequency of meals matter, exercise matters… it all matters, it all contributes or detracts.
As my OP clearly states, my only goal at the moment is to take off 10% of my weight, 30 pounds. I know exactly how much better that feels, and surprising though it may be, there is a marked difference for me between 270 and 300. If I want to lose more after that, I’ll continue. But my goals are quite reasonable.
This fascinates me… I thought I was the only one who thought of this. I call it focusing on adding instead of subtracting and I’d actually forgotten about it. But I’ve thought about doing it for a long time, I’m glad you reminded me!
(Underlying theory being, for me at least: commit to eating X, less room for Y, and X is way healthy anyway.)
Yes, I’m VERY glad you reminded me, and I’m VERY glad to know that someone else is doing it and finding it works!
Cool beans.
(I eat a lot of beans, too. Low fat, high fiber, nutritional powerhouses)
You might be surprised: Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds - CNN.com
Yeesh. Interesting. But one guy does not a study make.
I just keep thinking of all the super-obese people diagnosed with malnutrition because they live on garbage food (chips, pizza, soda, etc.) and that’s not about fat or thin, it’s about the quality of the calories. Poor.
And let us never forget SuperSize Me. I’ve often wondered how honest that film was, but it didn’t surprise me.
Problem is, weight issues have a behavioral component, and if something’s got a behavioral component, people are going to have an expectation that the behavior can be changed. Let’s face it, anyone can lose weight under the right circumstance.
Just about everyone has something or other they have problems with…some can’t manage money, some can’t handle booze, some can’t quit smoking. And sometimes there’s a genetic component that makes those things difficult. But if that bad behavior is ruining their health, their life, or just making them unhappy, they have to suck it up and change the behavior because you can’t change your genetics…all you CAN change is your behavior and *** no one else can do it for you***.
A lot of times the approach around here is not delicate (this is a board after all that prides itself on mocking people who are stupid, which is not even something a person can help, so that tells you how sensitive people around her can be), but saying in a rational tone that it IS possible to beat a weight problem and that if you’re finding it impossible then something is wrong with your approach is not the same thing as treating someone like shit.
or mental/emotional. I know I can lose weight, I’ve done it before. several years back, I dropped about 55 lbs and got down to around 5-7 lbs over my ideal weight (if you put any stock in BMI.) Problem was that even then I didn’t really feel any better about myself, I still didn’t like the way I looked, so later as I got sloppy and the weight slowly returned (partially, my regain is less than half of what I lost) I’ve found little motivation to lose it again.
Hey, Stoid. I can’t figure out if you want advice or agreement - so you’ll get both. 
I know it’s definitely more complicated than a lot of people want to make it. My husband eats constantly and weighs 145 pounds. He used to be athletic but now he mostly sits on his ass at work and home, and it’s a chore just to get him to exercise with me. He’s got the dream metabolism - but he also eats very healthy foods due to his multiple food intolerances. I haven’t tracked his caloric intake but I’m betting he eats between 2,500 and 3,000 calories a day, without gaining weight.
So believe me when I say that I understand some of us get the better genetic (or early childhood environmental, or whatever) deal than others. Simply put, it’s just not fair.
I have always struggled with weight and emotional eating - but I have also overcome that struggle, hence the advice part of my post. If you think you can go from eating 3,000 calories to 1,400 calories a day with no preamble, you are setting yourself up for failure. You are not going to lose weight overnight - and you don’t want to, because research shows that people are far more successful at weight loss when they emphasize healthy behaviors over actually losing weight, and when they make small, consistent incremental changes. You need to get it out of your head that you need to start losing weight now. Instead you should be thinking, ‘‘I need to drink less soda now’’ or ‘‘I need to walk 2 miles a week’’ now or just one small thing that feels possible. Eventually you’ll feel so good about doing that one thing that you’ll add more things, and it will snowball, and the weight will come off naturally.
Yes, you have to be obsessed for a while - but only a while. I track everything I eat, every day - ever teaspoon, every nibble - and it takes about 5 minutes out of my day. I also cook every night - that takes a little longer, but you learn to make time, and it ceases to take up so much headspace. Eventually your new way of thinking and behaving will become a habit and you’ll do it unconsciously. Also, you will start to LOVE it. You will learn to love healthy food. You will learn to think of food as fuel for your body instead of a way to stuff your feelings. Really, you will - you can. It doesn’t have to be painful and miserable. It can just be a new way of living life - slowly, gradually, one triumphant step at a time.
The Beck Diet Solution, a cognitive therapy book for weight loss by Judith Beck, changed my life. I recommend it to anyone who struggles with psychological self-sabotage and all that ‘‘this will never work this is so hard it’s not fair!’’ stuff that is so common with those of us who struggle. Because of that book, I don’t struggle any more.
And because of SparkPeople, I have all the support and encouragement I could ever ask for.
It’s NOT always easy (but it gets easier), it’s NOT fair (and so aren’t a lot of things), but it CAN be done and if you allow it to, it will turn into something beautiful and positive that affects every area of your life.
Good luck!
250g of carbs per day doesn’t sound crazy to me. That’s about the level I was at when I was dieting two and a half years ago to (successfully) lose 40 pounds (205->165), at least according to my food diary. (Actually, it was about 225g on an 1800 calorie diet, so about 50% carbs.)
Just as another data point, when I first changed my lifestyle (and this was completely changing the way I ate AND daily exercise), it took me 8 weeks before I lost a single pound.
It sucks, but I don’t think a month is long enough to come to any conclusions, especially if you’re still sedentary. I started out with 20 minutes of brisk walking, but had already worked my way up to 30 minutes on the stair climber before I started losing anything.
I think most people get 250+ daily, and it’s the recommendation of the USDA and most dietitians.
i just think that more than 150-200g (unless you’re extremely active) is an unhealthy amount of sugars for most humans to be consuming. I have some… different… views on nutrition that directly oppose most well-known recommendations.
No, that doesn’t sound that different necessarily. There’s a lot of folks out there who say cut the carbs to the levels you suggest (and lower–I mean “low carb” and all that’s been the craze for the last decade), and I actually do think that there is merit to that. I just don’t think 50% of daily calories as carbs is a bad suggestion. (I know I myself was probably 70% carbs before I started watching my diet.) I personally feel best at that level. Much more than 50% carbs, and I feel sluggish and constantly hungry. Much lower than 50%, and I feel irritable, restless, and cloudy headed. I just don’t think there’s one diet to fit everyone. Some folks seem to bounce off the wall with energy on a near zero-carb diet. The best diet, of course, is the one you can sustain.
Indeed.
And each person’s ability to control their behavior, particularly in this arena, is as varied as everything else. We do not all have the same abilities and capabilities, we do not all have the same issues, we do not all have the same responses and reactions to the same foods, and we for sure don’t have identical life experiences.
So some people’s “expectation” of what other people can accomplish (and, most critically, sustain over a lifetime,- find me the fat person who hasn’t lost the weight at least 2 or 3, if not a dozen times, and I’ll eat my hat!) is just another way of stating the same damn thing: fat people “should” be able to control their eating sufficiently to not be fat, so, if they are fat, it must be because they are weak, self-indulgent, slothful (fill in the judgmental dismissive adjective of your choice here) individuals who have made the choice to be fat and therefore deserve/can’t complain/have to expect whatever judgmental, dismissive behavior is directed at them as a result.
And I call bullshit on that.