So I seem to be fat. Here's my plan. What else can I do that is supported by [I]evidence[/I]?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Recently, I have noticed that I have slipped from having a bit too much belly fat to actually having a real problem. At 5’8", I weigh about 200 lbs. Most of the excess, over my dry mass of about 140 lbs, is fat. So I need to lose 60 lbs.

I don’t think any amount of half-assing it will cut it. I’ve tried the frozen meals that are 300 calories and a little bit of walking every day. Ineffective. I get hungrier eating the frozen meals and end up binging on candy bars and fruit. Where I live, the climate is too hot to walk in the evening - now that I have an extra 60 lbs of fat, I can’t lose heat, and so I sweat copiously and feel terrible after even a relatively pathetic amount of walking (about a mile or so). Also, it’s terribly boring, walking by myself, and so I often skip doing it.

So, here’s the plan :

I’m going to throw out my office chairs and switch to a treadmill desk. It will be the type that does not have an adjustment crank or motor, but instead you have to move pins on the supports in order to change the height. I’ll get one of those nice LifeSpan fitness treadmills and my intention is to originally use the treadmill at a slow enough speed so that I can stand all day (you cannot stand stationary at a stationary desk without problems, your leg muscles are a key part to return blood back up the veins to your heart), and gradually work up to 1-1.5 mph or so. With a 10 hour workday, that should equate to about 10 miles a day. I’ll lower the temperature in the office to 55 or 60 so I don’t sweat.

So, every workday, I either stand or I have to walk. Walking hurts less than standing. Theory is, it’ll force me to do the exercise I rarely do.

I’m going to throw out all of my food and switch to Soylent with maybe 1 prepackaged supplemental meal per day. Theory : soylent doesn’t taste that good, and it reduces or eliminates the temptation to over-eat. Also, it is practical to easily log how much soylent powder is consumed per day so I have an accurate measurement of calories in. If I use regular food, I would be forced to weigh every portion of low fat chicken breast or whatever on a scale, and there’s inaccuracy with relying on different caloric measurements for different food types. (tldr, if my only diet is soylent, and I reduce calories, it’s less actual calories even if the packaging is incorrect. With a heterogeneous diet this isn’t true)

So, diet, exercise. Final step is I’ll do the 5 basic lifts - barbell deadlift, squats, row, bench, and shoulder press - every other day.

Do you have any further ideas there is empirical evidence for. I’m not looking for useless tips or things that worked for you. Everything I have planned so far there’s years of research behind, with the use of a treadmill and soylent being modern refinements to reduce the willpower required.

2

Sounds like you got it figured out. Good luck!

3

having a diet that is too restrictive can be hard to stick too

4

Let me get this straight, when eating frozen meals in an effort to lose weight you got hungry and binged. To work on this you are going to switch eating almost only Soylent?

I highly suspect that switching to Soylent isn’t going to solve the binge problem. Additionally, do you plan on eating Soylent for the rest of your life? If not, I’d aim for something that is sustainable.

<personal anecdote - yeah I know you didn’t want 'em but here ya go>
I am about your height. I got up to 215. I dropped down to 145 which, given my frame, is about right. I did so by cutting out regular soda, cutting back carbs and exercising.

I didn’t change how much I ate but I stopped eating bread/chips/junk and started eating salads for most of my meals with chicken, beef and cheese on top. I never counted a calorie and ate until I was full. I also worked out, with the big thing being treadmill with a large incline and a fairly slow speed so that I stayed in the low cardio range and didn’t get into higher cardio. Also did free weights.

I have put on an extra 20 or so pounds. Got married, have kids on the way and have a jacked up knee. Between the threeI haven’t worked out recently. I hope to get the knee fixed in the next month or so. However, I stopped eating as many carbs (my wife loves to cook carb heavy food) and already dropped a few pounds.

I think the goal should be to change to a sustainable diet that allows you to actually enjoy some of the food you like.

Slee

5

If you had issues with pre-packaged meals making you binge, you’re going to have bigger problems trying to stick to a disgusting liquid diet. With amping up your activity as planned, I would bet you can stick to a 2000 calorie day and still lose weight.

6

Taking this at face value…

The biggest area of research you’re missing is the psychology of lifestyle changes.
You seem not to have considered the psychological sustainability of your plan–especially the diet part. Are you going to eat Soylent for the rest of your life? Or do you have a plan for learning how to normal food properly? Are you never going to eat food at a party or at work or with family?

Also, a successful diet generally involves reducing your caloric intake by a particular amount. Reduce not enough or too much and it makes things harder to sustain (mostly for psychological reasons, but you should take those reasons as seriously as you do the physical ones–they are the reasons most people fail). So even with your soylent plan you should make some effort to figure out your baseline so you reduce your caloric intake by the appropriate amount.

And your exercise plan seems fine (assuming some reasonable programming for your five lifts). But you’re more likely to keep it up without injury if you transition to it instead of jumping in the deep end.

7

This sounds like an excellent plan to lose weight until you can’t stand it anymore (or possibly until you reach your goal weight, depending on your level of willpower), and then rapidly gain it all back plus.

As everyone else has said, you need to have a plan that will enable you to maintain a healthy weight.

8

You should be changing your lifestyle and relationship to food. Solyent is a failure before you even start, it will never satisfy you nor will it be something you can sustain.

Consider something like Weight Watchers, learning how to eat healthy, how to cook, how to eat out, and remain satisfied.

9

I think the biggest issue will be trying to maintain your diet over the long term. With the food issues you have, you probably need more professional help to get that under control. It’s like if you had a drug addiction and tried to beat it yourself. It’s like you have a food addiction right now and you need to get that under control.

The treadmill desk is a good idea. I know several people who have them and they like them and use them regularly. You should consider one even if it doesn’t help you lose weight. Your body will be healthier if you’re sitting less.

You may want to tackle the food and exercise issues separately. You don’t have to fix both at the same time. You may be better off focusing on one issue and seeing success there rather than trying to fix both and dealing with both sets of changes at once.

Personally, I find it much, much easier to get my diet under control when I’m exercising regularly. That is, I just naturally feel like eating better when I’m exercising. It doesn’t feel like work or need self control to maintain. That may be the case for you too.

You may want to consider some sort of group exercise program. For many people, they find the activity itself enjoyable and actually do it for fun–the exercise is a bonus. Feel free to PM me if you would like recommendations for which programs might be good for you. There’s such a huge range of classes you could take, it might be daunting to choose if you’re not familiar with them.

10

What can professionals do for me? Candy bars taste delicious, especially the flavor I like. (cadbury fruit and nut…) It did take about 7 years for me to gain this much weight - a little at a time. It could be worse - one problem is that while I’m fat, lots of people I know are lots fatter, so I feel less pressure to change than if everyone I knew was skinny.

I know of no credible medical treatment supported by double blind trials that can help significantly with food addiction…treatment of any addiction as far as I know is only marginally effective…]

The idea behind soylent is similar to the idea behind a diet of cat food. Cat food is so nasty that if it was the only thing you had in your pantry, you would only eat when absolutely famished and feeling weak from hunger, and eat only small portions of it. Cat food isn’t intended to be safe for humans, so I’m not going to try that, but Soylent is.

11

I only thought of Soylent when thinking about the least effort possible way to control my food intake. I could do the thing where you buy a bunch of chicken breast and avacado and brown rice and spices and so on, then spend several hours a week cooking it all up, then I use a digital food scale and measure each portion out. I then keep these pre-prepared meals - 6 a day, of course, in the fridge, and similarly, it’s the only food in my pantry so in order to eat anything else I have to go out of my way and drive somewhere.

That sounds like a lot of work, and a lot of hassle keeping track of it all. With Soylent or some other similar powder diet, I could track it simply by tracking weekly or monthly calories by just counting the number of soylent packages missing from a monthly shipment. Far easier, and weekly/monthly calorie counts are likely to be more accurate because you are integrating over a longer timespan.

Moreover, there’s the “what’s the laziest thing to do” argument. The laziest thing to do if the only food I have is that nasty liquid powder, assuming it is barely edible at all, is to drink some of it when I’m hungry enough. Going to the store or a restaurant is more work and I won’t do it often.

12

But such a radical change is a lot more difficult to maintain than something like “eat the usual meals, but instead of a dinner plate use a dessert plate”. Chocolate is OK - but make it black, a single square of 85% beats the choco-urge better than 8 of milk chocolate. Reduce, substitute - but item by item, don’t try to “say no to food”. It won’t work. Soylent is psychologically appropriate for people who don’t like food, people who don’t enjoy eating. Not for you, Mr. Candybar.

13

I’m not saying it’s not worth a shot. You just have to know that the biggest obstacle you face is sustaining it psychologically. Just looking in as an outsider, I’d give you a 1% of sustaining soylent as a long-term healthy diet. And if you drop 60 pounds on it, and then go off it, you’ll shoot right back up if you haven’t been practicing healthy eating.

If I were you and were totally committed to trying soylent regardless of what someone on a message board opines, I would also be experimenting with cooking things, not every meal, that I might eventually add to my repertoire. It’s pretty fucking hard to binge on, say, kale salad. Or marinated chicken breast. It can also be really tasty if prepared well. I would be working to develop that collection of dishes for when the day comes when you get sick of soylent. Truth be told, after some practice, they don’t take any more effort than preparing soylent (which is harder than you are imagining).

The other issue is outside food. If you’ve never tried to limit yourself to food you cannot get anywhere but home, you’re in for a challenge. Food is everywhere. So if you lack the willpower to keep your nose out of the pantry at home, you will find yourself binging at the weekly opportunity that presents itself outside the home.

I say this all as someone who has never lost a significant amount of weight. Just my observation of humanity, for whatever it might be worth.

14

Yeah, or, if cat food (or Soylent) is the only thing you had in your pantry, you’d get in your car and go to Burger King. :dubious:

15

Aim for food that is as filling but low-calorie as possible. Feeling hungry is a weight-loss-Achilles-Heel.
So, lots of carrots, high-fiber foods, and then drink lots of water with that food to keep full.

16

You have got to learn to eat healthy, and that means a BALANCED diet.
Weight Watchers is excellent in that respect. It can be a little costly at first, but you go to the meetings and get encouragement from other members. They teach you how to eat a balanced diet, how to measure carbs, fat, protein, etc. It’s not that hard really. Once you get established with them, you can wing it on your own with only occasional attendance at their meetings, and costs go down once you have reached you goal.
The nice thing about WW is that no foods are restricted, and you do get to treat yourself.

17

Here’s an alternative plan:

  1. Starting out, with your exercise plan you should burn about 3000 calories per day. Plan to eat about 2500 calories per day. This is sustainable**, and you will lose about 1 pound per week.

  2. Every week, subtract 10 calories from what you eat, because by losing one pound you will burn about 10 calories less per day. (In one year, then, you will be at 2000 calories per day, still very sustainable).

  3. Write down everything you eat. Everything. This is actually part of the recommendation to changing your relationship to food, it’s a way of seeing how you really eat*.

In a year or a little more, you will have reached your goal and you will have a much better relationship with food.

*There was some British show where this awful woman took on overweight people as a project, and tried to teach them in a few weeks how to eat. The one thing she did that was effective was to assemble, on a large table, the typical weekly food that the person ate, and it always looked horrible, and actually did seem to motivate them.

**Things that help make it sustainable include having high-protein foods at hand for snacking when you have to snack, because protein is effective at suppressing your appetite for several hours. Be careful of the salt in a lot of ready-to-eat meats, such as lunchmeat - I used to like turkey made for sandwiches until I looked at the sodium. So now I like Premier Protein prepared shakes, 160 calories, 30 grams of protein, all ready to drink. And switch from other beverages, including diet soda, coffee and tea, to plain water, and lots of it. Water can also take the edge off your appetite, at least for a little while. Sometimes that’s all you need.

eta: the one pound per week may be hard to track precisely, as a person’s weight can swing a couple of pounds from one day to the next. Just keep on track and you will see the trend over time. This takes conviction not to get discouraged.

18

I’m close to 200 lbs., shooting for ~180. According to my sportswatch, I burn ~1400 calories over a 10 mile run.

Walking 10 miles a day will burn a few less calories than running, but it is still pretty close. So, I think you might want to consider phasing in the diet portion of the program. Something like 1200 calories a day is a lot of extra activity, maybe you will want to give your body a little while to adjust to it before also radically changing your diet. I do like the idea of seriously attempting to burn off the fat if it is bothering you.

I’d also suggest not getting discouraged if you can’t handle 50 miles a week at first. That’s a lot of miles, even for walking, you may need to work up to it. I guess my unwanted personal fitness anecdote is that it is okay to proceed in steps from whatever point you happen to be at.

19

Huh. That would explain why the treadmill works for people who have tried it. I can’t have a productive job and also walk 10 miles a day - there isn’t enough spare time. Clients have deadlines, want results now, etc. But, if I can work and exercise simultaneously, and exercising is moderately is actually helping me work, it’s a different story. I didn’t realize it was so many calories - you won’t burn enough calories to matter if you sprint on the stairstepper for 20 minutes which is about all you have time to do if you can’t be doing anything productive at the same time.

20

Habeed, your attitude sucks WRT losing weight.

Listen, losing weight is hard work and takes a lot of will power. It’s going to require an effort on your part. If you can’t even be bothered to measure out food portions then I suggest you say “fuck it” and open up another Cadbury bar. Because your not going to win this battle with an attitude of excuses and “it’s too much trouble”.
Exercise, eat a healthy balanced diet and forget about these gimmicky diets.
I say this as a person who has lost just over 30lbs since February.
PS. KEEP JUNK FOOD OUT OF YOUR HOUSE.

Good luck.