Need Help with Sensible Diet

In My Humble Opinion
21

I used The Biggest Loser cookbooks as a guide in my recent weight loss (45 lbs since March). At the beginning of each cookbook, it basically gives you a little rundown of what needs to be in your diet every day and what doesn’t.

Here’s what I did:

Replace any flour products (breads, pastas, cereals, tortillas, etc.) with whole wheat. Complex carbs fill you up longer and give you more sustained energy.

Avoid refined sugar as much as possible. Check the nutrition labels-- anything over 10g sugars per serving is too much.

Multiply your current weight by 7. That’s how many calories you can have per day. Yes, it’s a lot less than you thought. It’s doable. You’ll learn to eat lower calorie foods that fill you up.

Count calories religiously. I only did this for the first two months, until I had basically memorized the calorie content of all the foods I eat often, but I lost 25 lbs doing it. I kept a food journal and that helped a lot, both in education and in keeping me motivated.

Follow a modified food pyramid of 4-3-2-1: 4 servings fruit/veg, 3 lean protein, 2 whole grains, and 1 “extra” (~200 calories) per day. If something you’re eating falls outside that structure, seriously reconsider eating it.

Eat 4-5x a day in small amounts. I ate breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, and then dinner.

Do not eat out. Seriously, just avoid it as much as possible. It’s so difficult to find anything healthy, and even if you do find something low-calorie, it will still be full of sodium, which will impede your weight loss. I did it enough to keep myself sane (probably once a week), and only at places that provided nutritional info. I also limited myself to half servings. If you do it that way, you’ll lose your enchantment with it, because you’ll find it’s much more of a hassle to find something that fits into your diet than it is to simply cook a meal at home.

Work out a lot. I worked out daily and still do. 30 minutes cardio (run/walk), 30 minutes weights, alternating upper body, lower body, and abs/back. Don’t stress the same muscle group two days in a row-- exercising tears down the muscle, and you need at least one day to rebuild it.

Learn to cook. Buy healthy cookbooks-- I highly recommend The Biggest Loser series; the food does not taste like diet food and is easy to prepare, even for someone like me who hates cooking.

Read nutrition labels. Not just the nutritional breakdown, but also the ingredients. Stay away from white flour, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, butter, eggs, and most oils. (If you must have/use oil, go with olive oil.)

This one helped me a lot: find low-guilt desserts. I’m a dessert fiend. I go through probably 5-6 no sugar added fudgesicles (60 calories each) per week. I’m also a big fan of Blue Bell’s No Sugar Added ice cream (in small amounts!) and Jello’s 60-calorie sugar free dark chocolate pudding cups. TBL also has a lot of easy dessert recipes.

Good luck, and stay motivated! :slight_smile:

22

I absolutely hate cooking and a large part of the reason I used to be obese is clearly that unhealthy fast food is so easy to just buy and eat.

Most of my food now is made of from frozen vegetables, combined with some sort of lean meat like chicken and a bit of sauce. I might for example dump 500 grams of mixed frozen vegetables on a frying pan, together with 150-200 grams of chicken and warm it all up then add 100 gram tomato sauce. Takes about 10-15 minutes to prepare. I mostly buy pre-cooked chicken so it just needs to be heated.

Luckily I don’t mind eating much of the same every day and I get my variation from lunch at work or by changing the chicken to lean beef or the type of sauce.

23

There are any number of sites on line that will allow you to log what you eat each day and provide reports of your overall nutrition for the day, week, month, or longer. Sometimes just seeing what you eat helps you figure out where you can tweak things.

Get a $20 digital kitchen scale. It makes you feel much more secure about what you are actually eating.

Personally, I can’t say enough about really lean meat: ultra-lean hamburger, browned. drained and rinsed, pork tenderloin, chicken breast. I bake or broil these in bulk and then freeze them. It’s really very easy cooking: throw meat on broiler pan or in glass dish, sprinky seasoning of any kind on it, stick it in the oven. I would buy a fancy probe thermometer that you stick in the meat and it beeps when the recommended temp is reached. The grocery store also sells rotisserie turkey breasts sometimes. Pull off the skin and those are very lean.

If you do that, you can cook all your meat in one evening a week, or even less often if you have enough freezer space. Then it’s just a matter of finding good things to go with the meat–wander the produce and frozen produce sections.

24

I found a really good calorie and fitness planner on WebMD and have planned my last two days of eating and activity . . . wow, it makes it sooooooo much easier!

25

I agree that anything made from grains is a problem, they are so carb dense and that includes pasta, crispbreads etc . But a tortilla is bread by another name. An average slice of wholegrain bread has about a third of the calories and a quarter of the fat of your “healthy” tortilla. You could consume about 2 pounds of vegetables to get the same calories as in the tortilla without the fat.