My daughter is 9.5 months old and I’m still too tired to restrict calories. Since we’re going to South Beach in a month though, I’m doing the 30 Day Shred.
I’m 5’6". Before the baby I weighed 180 and wanted to weigh 160. Now I just want to weigh 180 again. I’ve done three days of the Shred. In that time my weight has gone up from 196.4 to 199.8 (gigantic rolleyes).
I know deep down, though, that I won’t lose weight until I start counting calories… by which I mean, go hungry. Anaamika’s account of what she ate so far today sounds nice, but the fact is that a tall glass of 2% milk and a sandwich with !!!bread!!! just aren’t things that make a girl lose weight. Anything that makes you feel well-fed and comfortable isn’t (grumble grumble moan emo stomp stomp stomp).
What’s this “starving and tired” talk? Permanent weight loss doesn’t mean starving yourself. Just the opposite, in fact - getting yourself into starvation mode is usually a recipe for rebound weight gain.
I wasn’t really starving. I was just craving sugar.
Today I ate:
Hardboiled egg and banana
Two cups of coffee with soy milk and sugar
Two servings of almonds
A handful of terra chips (made out of beets and yams instead of potatoes)
3/4 cup of grapes
One cup of raw veg
Lunch-sized salad with small container of tuna, no dressing
Giant tea from Timmy’s
Pork chop with apple and raisin compote
Home made sweet potato fries with olive oil and spices
This is close to what I normally eat, except I often also eat something chocolate during the day, rice or bread with lunch and breakfast, and ice cream/something sweet after dinner.
In my experience, if you look at the short-term, week to week, your weight loss / gain graph can make about as much sense as quantum physics. However, over the long term, with data points spaced out, say, a year apart instead of a week, burning more calories than you eat will work.
Having not weighed myself for ages, I don’t quite believe my parents scales telling me I’m 12 stone (umm, 168 lbs?). But, true or not, I’d rather head to 140lbs (10 stone) or lower, so I’ll sign up to this thread to kick my arse into shape.
I’ve not got any great diet plan - just a general determination to cut out the cakes/choc/chips a bit more, definitely cut back on the weekend evening glasses of wine that turned into midweek half bottles of wine too, and get the running shoes out of the attic.
Last year I was a nursing mother (before the wine consumption kicked in) and could rely on all the calories to fall out of my boobs, this year they seem to all be heading for my hips, so it’s time to do something about it.
I’ve already emailed asking about local running groups!
I definitely understand about having the activity but not the food willpower. Caffeine is also one of my nemesis, mainly because I can’t just do straight coffee but must add all sorts of milk/soy/sugar/whatever until it almost becomes a meal. Good luck trying to pare it down! It is hard to do since caffeine withdrawal headaches can be so killer.
Do you have the resources to be able to check in with a nutritionist or someone similar to help keep your goals healthy instead of letting the eating disorder creep back in? (Sorry if this is too forward, I just remember the last time I had to calorie count, it kind of took over, and I can imagine it very easy to slip into unhealthy territory.)
Also, being hungry isn’t good - if you need a snack, maybe carry around carrot sticks or apple slices to crunch on? They can fill you up a little without adding any excess calories. I read someone else on here that if you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re not hungry - and I thought that sounded reasonable.
If you hate diets because they make you feel like you’re starving, it’s probably because they are starving you. IME, even the most sane of the bunch, Weight Watchers, tends to cut you too far down. All weight loss programs want you to see big results quickly, so you’ll be happy with their product. But really, losing half a pound a week consistently is so much better than starving, losing 5 pounds in a week, then giving up.
If anyone is interested in a pretty good estimate of how many calories you’re actually burning, check out About.com’s calculator. If you take that number and shave off 250 calories a day, that’s hardly noticeable to your stomach (according to the author of Mindless Eating, and my experience), but it will deliver that consistent pound every two weeks of loss.
When we went to the dietician we found out that my husband needs to eat about 3,000 calories a day to lose weight safely. The bigger you get, the more calories you burn, so using a plan made for small women who want to be smaller (can be as low as 1,200 a day) can really mess you up when you’re burning way more than that!
I want to join up! My story is that I was super fit from 2005-2006, gained some weight post-horrible relationship, then super-fit again from 2007-2009 at which point my serious relationship crashed and burned and my deep distaste for my old profession seemed unbearable so I decided I was going to quit practicing law and start a new career. Spent 2009 mostly eating, working 2 law jobs (fulltime and volulnteering as the agency’s union lawyer), studying obsessively for the GMATs and then writing b-school apps, gained mumble, lost half of it before b-school and then slowly put back on 8-10 pounds between the start of business school in Sept. 2010 and now. That was largely due to the stress of recruiting-both for my summer internship and then having to re-recruit for my fulltime offer after my awesome summer internship company had a rough start on their product.
However, I have a fulltime job lined up and I REALLY want to do the sales rotation, which means I am definitely have to drop at least 15 pounds if not more. Also, I am going to one of the biggest weight loss surgery/healthcare companies in the world and ya know, I don’t want to go there pudgey. Also my (totally amazing) new employers were like “you know, feel free to develop senioritis,” so I’ve taken a course load that is bearable and cleared my calendar to work out.
I’ve been really good since coming home on the 22nd and did not glutton out over the holidays. Started working out December 27th or so, but only got to serious 1 hour workouts as of last Friday. I’ve been doing an hour consistently on the elliptical trainer or walking uphill on the treadmill between 2-10% incline at 3.5-3.6 mph (2% for 4 minutes, 3% for 4 minutes and so on).
I’ll be working out for an hour a day like this in the morning till I go back to school, after which I want to add my zumba tape at night or before I go to my night classes-for a month.
At the end of January I plan to switch out the Zumba with P90x but I really want to prove to myself that I CAN do workout videos at home consistently before paying for it and all the equipment.
Foodwise I’ve gone back to the 1200 calorie diet that I followed from 2007-2009. The only difference is that I’ve developed a distaste for meat, so I subbed out chicken with boiled egg whites. I log everything on the myfitnesspal app on my iPhone.
I’m hoping to be 15 to 20 pounds down by May 1st, when I graduate. Should be doable!
Do you mean because they’re carrying around extra muscle and walk faster, or are you talking about the supposed “bonus burn” post-workout? The latter’s unlikely to actually happen unless you’re doing some serious athletic training. Some studies sayyes, some say no. They seem to agree that you need high-intensity workouts that make your heart beat rapidly after the workout’s done.
There’s no such thing as “starvation mode”. I mean, unless you’re literally starving to death. It’s a myth. The idea that you can burn more by eating more seems strangely close to homeopathy, to me.
Assuming you’re actually keeping yourself alive, there’s no need to fear any “starvation zone”. Push those calories as low as you can go!
I have to say, I have not felt hungry on Weight Watchers (as long as I’ve thought ahead to have plan-safe food around!) I slip up when it comes to alcohol and the goddamned snack table, not because I’m actually hungry.
Eh, I really don’t feel that’s sustainable. People who “diet” have a hard time maintaining. You should see “diet” as a noun; as in “the koala has a diet of eucalyptus leaves”. To lose weight, keep it off, and do it in a healthy way that you can really sustain you need to be eating the way you want to eat for the rest of your life, possibly just a little bit more vigilantly.
It’s a sore spot with me because I can’t convince my fiance that the severe calorie restriction he keeps following isn’t sustainable (he lost a lot of weight on it last year and kept most of it off, but he yoyos because he’s either “on it” or “off it”.)
Thanks! Yes, I had a headache yesterday afternoon, likely from the lowered caffeine intake, and I’m not even right down to zero - I’ve only cut it in half or so!
I think I didn’t bring enough food to work yesterday, so I’ve added some extra today. Mostly protien rich foods (eggs and chicken). It is the calorie counting that triggers issues for me, so I avoid it. I just eat as healthy as possible. I still regulary visit my therapist, and we talk about any ED related issues if they come up.
Oh, dear people who feel hungry all the time, please make sure that you are getting enough fat in your diet. One of the things that makes going low-carb, moderately high fat and protein work for me, is that I feel full and satisfied on less food overall. When I eat everything but simply cut calories, I feel hungry all the time, and wheat makes my belly bloat, too. I know we are all different, and different ways of eating work differently for different people, but low-fat dieting, using pretzels, etc, as snacks, resulted in a weight gain and depression for me.
Weight Watchers actually doesn’t cut you down that much. Points are determined by your start weight, age, and gender; the more you weigh, the more points you have. I started out with 39 points and lost some of them as I lost weight. (I’m now down to 28 points.) And if you lose more than two pounds per week on a consistent basis, you get to have a chat with the leader to figure out what you’re doing wrong, because you are doing something wrong. If you want to look at it from an apples-to-apples standpoint, one point is roughly 50 calories. This means that I’m eating roughly 1400 calories per day, which is enough to run a deficit, but not so much that I’m going hungry. This, by the way, is three good meals and a snack like popcorn or cereal without milk.
And this is why I wonder what the hell is wrong with me, because even when I go low-ish carb, medium fat and high protein, Weight Watchers is completely unsustainable for me. I go crazy with hunger. Same with SparkPeople’s recommended calorie range, yes even with a reasonable goal of losing a pound a week.
The only weight loss program that ever worked for me was Weight Watcher’s old Core program, where you could eat as much as you needed off of a certain list of foods (with a few points a week for goodies). Unfortunately being on Core makes it impossible to eat at restaurants or let other people cook for you, so I gradually wandered away from it.
You’re eating a lot of sugar already - banana, sugar in coffee, beets and yams, grapes, raw veg (possibly - especially carrots), apple and raisin compote, sweet potato fries. Eating that much sugar without a higher balance of fat and protein is probably going to make you more hungry than if you had just skipped it. It is also probably going to make you crave “actual” sugar too - chocolate, cookies, etc.
Sorry, don’t mean to come off preachy. Just some folks don’t seem to realize right away that fruit and starch can be just as “sugary” as something that tastes like sugar.
Zsofia you are so right about “diets.” That is why I so loathe having to do this low carb thing right now. I was trying so hard just to eat better - and I was. I was happy just eating food. But it so wasn’t working for me. It was my doctor who suggested “low carb for 2 weeks to jar your metabolism” so that is what I am going to do. But it is me who knows that the only thing that will work is to severely limit the number and types of carbs I ingest, so that is what it’s gonna have to be.
My friend’s doctor told him he should “eat salad with lemon, and tuna in water” to lose weight. We laugh about it all the time because really who is going to do that? It would be much easier for the doctor and the patient to go over the patient’s current diet and figure out how to tweak it and what to eliminate. Prescribing a “diet” is just absurd.
I know on other boards - weight loss boards - people say “WOE” instead of diet. Meaning “Way of Eating.” I think that’s nice.
It’s ok, and yes, I realilze how much sugar is in fruit and some veggies. I was referring to my craving for non-natural sugars. How would you suggest I change my diet to increase the fat and protein while reducing my natural sugars? Keep in mind that I’m generally very active.
I prefer to eat as much fruits and veggies as I can for the vitamins and fiber. It allows me to feel like I am eating healthier while not counting calories. We are also loosly following a paleo-type diet and I am working on eliminating as much refined carbs and gluten from my diet as possible to prep for IVF.
One way to improve your fruit eating is to avoid tropical fruit and dried fruit. Those are both super-dense sources of sugar. So your banana and your raisins are on the outs. The dried veggie chips are probably nearly as bad.
