I am not totally sedentary but I’m not running daily marathons either, I walk several miles a day or sometimes every other day depending(far more than anyone else I know and they mock me for it). Yet I rarely feel hungry and I normally once or twice a day, not even especially high calorie foods like today I ate a handful of ground beef for lunch with an orange and a late dinner of herring and a glass of milk. That tends to shock other people, they can’t imagine someone eating so little. But I’m not even skinny, I’m kind of chubby. I do drink one or two bottles of juice or soda as well.
Yeah. That’s what happens when half your daily caloric intake is refined sugar. One quart of juice or soda is 400 calories, so you can work out the math from there.
Literally, every single food and drink you mentioned is quite high in calories compared to fairly easy substitutions, depending on what kind of milk and soda you’re talking about.
Well it seems like other people are drinking the soda and juice too, AND eating a lot more food than me AND usually after work beers. High calorie foods is in relation to say eating a cheeseburger and fries for lunch(usually with other crap too and a big soda).
I dunno I am usually just like overwhelmed with the amount of food other people eat, and then they comment on why I’m not hungry.
EDIT:I can’t stand diet soda, the both aspartame and sucralose taste like chemicals instead of sugar. I’ve just taken to feeling weird when everyone is like whats wrong with you why aren’t you eating, eat eat eat eat.
That’s because most people also exercise or go dancing or do something other than sitting in front of a computer, so they need more calories. Really, how is this a mystery?
Get a calorie tracker app, it was very eye opening to me to see where my calories are coming from. The first week I used it I didn’t change my eating habits, I just ate what I normally was used to and tracked it.
I thought I was eating healthy enough, but it turns out I am eating way too much sugar. I rarely drink soda or juice, but I somehow the sugar is getting in there. It also forced me to make better snack choices. When you only have 400 calories left for the day and you are hungry, carrot sticks fill you up just as well as a bag of chips and I can still eat a decent dinner.
How many miles a day do you walk? Walking a mile only uses 100 calories or so. That means a couple-three miles to ‘burn off’ a bottle of juice or soda.
Not sure how fast you are walking, but one or two miles per day if done at a leisurely pace doesn’t do much at all. Get your heart rate up and lift some weights (it can be light weights) 5 times per week. Eat a balanced diet. This will kick your metabolism into high gear (**if **you keep it up) and you will lose weight. People think that there is some magical formula to being fit and skinny. There isn’t. Exercise and eating well is all you need to do. At work we have a lot of potlucks, if I have something loaded in calories, I don’t obsess about it or feel bad, I just exercise harder later and keep things light.
I recently watched a TV programme which asked an overweight family to keep a food diary and then followed them with hidden cameras, PIs etc to map what they ‘actually’ consumed.
Every single one came back with a food diary in a safe 1500-2000 calories per day. The secret filming saw them consume much larger portions than they realised, snack foods they didn’t bother to record, sodas and alcohol they failed to take into account. Pretty much everyone’s ‘actual’ intake was about double the calories they had written down.
You mention ground beef, milk, soda and oily fish. All VERY high calorie foods. Try switching beef to more white meat and veg, drink water, swap oily fish for white, such as cod or seabass. Not everyone is a fan, but I found counting the points on Weight Watchers to be very revealing about what foods are high in fat and sugar, and how portion control makes a huge difference. Even peas carry points!
Grude, are you trying to figure out why you aren’t losing weight while you are eating so little or trying to figure out why people are shocked at what you eat? I read your OP as being the latter, but it seems everyone else is seeing it as the former.
Here’s the thing, gaining and losing weight really is a simple function of how many calories you take in minus how many you burn. One may have medical conditions or whatever that affect that, but realizing that, one can take that into account. Another thing to consider, as has been said upthread, is that a typical amount of food for a typical American is probably too much since, IIRC, +60% of Americans are overweight. People also have a tendency to underestimate the portion sizes and calories.
Looking at the OP, it sounds like you probably aren’t eating a whole lot, but it also sounds like what you’re eating is very dense in calories, so it could easily make up for the smaller portion sizes. Similarly, walking a few miles sounds like a lot, but you’re only talking about make a couple hundred calories. If you’re not really raising your heartrate after you’re done, you won’t be above your resting metabolic rate. Similarly, if your muscle mass is low, your resting metabolic rate will be lower.
So, yeah, you could be even only be eating 2000 calories, but if you’re really not doing anything to burn off above your resting metabolic rate, you could still gain weight, even though 2000 calories is fairly typical. Without some really good data on your activity and food intake, it’s hard to really say much more, but just on all of that, it sounds like you’re underestimating what you’re eating and overestimating your level of activity.
ETA: Rhiannon, it sounds like both to me. That the OP is kind of shocked at not being hungry and so are other people. But we tend to eat with our eyes. Eating a fairly large salad just looks like more food than maybe some small sandwich and a soda, but it’s quite possible the latter has twice as many calories.
I saw a similar show, and even when they recorded their food, their serving size was way off. One man recorded he had serving of pasta, but it really was a whole bag of pasta and a whole jar of sauce. Another woman said she had one serving of rice, but it really was a whole plate of fried rice. The show was about people who cannot seem to lose weight even though they eat right, but when the show followed them it was clear they weren’t eating right.
Beef and milk don’t have to have a lot of calories, unless you are eating 30% fat (ewww!) beef (unlike say, 99.5% fat-free beef and vegetable soup with 2 grams of fat and 250-300 calories in a 2-cup can) and whole milk (does anybody even drink that? A cup of 1% milk is 100 calories, so I get about 400-500 calories from milk a day*, plus all of the nutrients it has (including 32-40 grams of protein; I aim for around 100 a day so this is significant, especially when you compare it to calories, around 20% of total calories but 40% of protein), milk even helps you lose weight - oddly enough, high-fat dairy results in weight loss compared to low-fat).
*This used to be about the same amount of calories from soda (2-3 cans a day, plus a juice box at lunch), back when I was a kid into high school (both soda and milk are taken at meals, I drink water otherwise); soda of course has no nutritional value other than calories (at least the juice box claimed to have 100% Vitamin C, maybe others).
