can’t do it without discipline, but super high quality chocolate often comes in smaller size bars. It is the easiest way I have found to control cravings.
Another thing is to change the way you eat, this is valid for chocolate more than cheese, but try sucking the chocolate slowly till the peice melts rather than chewing it, it is amazing how much more flavour you notice and how much longer it makes the chocolate last.
For cheese I recomend Kavli crispy thin crackers. They have very little taste themselves which means you get to concentrate on the taste from the cheese, and are also very low calorie.
Probably why I can’t understand the “lots of ice cream.” I’m looking at a puddle by the time I finish a scoop - much less a pint or Cold Stone’s “gotta have it” size. But once again, quality is important. You can spend time eating really good ice cream (or frozen yogurt - for me it has less fat than cream ice cream, but is as satisfying).
Er, wow. Could you expound on this a little. First, it’s scary to think that exercise might be working against losing fat.
Second, a 200-300 calorie deficit? That also seems like a tough proposition. 200-300 calories is less than, well, less than a lot of single serving “snacks” that I can think of. How does one accurately find where that 200-300 range lies?
Mmmm, Cabot cheese. A buddy of mine and I drive the hour and a half to their main plant about twice a year for the “tour,” but really to sample the free cheese they offer in their gift shop. They have just about every variety they have available in tiny bite-size squares. Yum indeed!
I agree.
I’ve been trying to think of a delicate way to put this, but I give up. Getting “too much exercise” - to the point where the body is going to consume muscle rather than fat, is I think, less of a concern for morbidly obese people.
[QUOTE=Eonwe]
Second, a 200-300 calorie deficit? That also seems like a tough proposition. 200-300 calories is less than, well, less than a lot of single serving “snacks” that I can think of. How **does one accurately find where that 200-300 range lies? ** [ /QUOTE]
I lost about 55 lbs eating around 1500 calories a day. My weight plateaued for over 12 weeks at 140 lbs (5 lbs from my original goal of 135, I am 5’7"). I worked harder to lose weight - cut calories, worked out more and the scale refused to budge. After a few months, I figured I had stopped losing weight so decided to “maintain” for the first time in my life. I very slowly added more calories until I was eating right around maintenance for someone of my height/weight/age/gender/activity level. Over the next 7 months, I lost 13 more lbs, finally stabalizing around 127. Very counter intuitive, but I had to EAT MORE to lose more.
I used to fight my body’s natural tendency to protect itself. I had to stop thinking myself as a modern woman with a desk job and a fully stocked grocery store and start thinking of myself as a prehistoric woman. What did prehistoric people do when the mammoth hunters bagged one, did they just sit around and say “no thanks, I’ll just gnaw this root?” No, they ate every bit they could and their bodies stored it for later. In the same way, if my plane crashed in the Andes, what would I want my body to do? I’d want it to hold onto every gram of fat reserves to keep me alive as long as possible. If I restict calories drastically while dieting, why should I be surprised when my body reacts like I would ultimately want it to?
So, the short answer to your question is - trial and error. Since it’s important to eat enough to get all the nutrients needed to be healthy and stay satisfied, I would recommend starting with relatively high calories and then giving it a couple of weeks, slowly reducing calories until you find the “sweet spot” where you are eating the right amount of calories to lose weight, but not so few calories that you freak your body out into thinking it’s a famine.
Worked wonders for me, lost 70 lbs and have kept it off for 18 months. I was only successful at weight loss when I stopped dieting.
This is a great story and illustrates the complexity of weight loss, and how it is not in fact, “simple.”
That said, it isn’t that complicated either. When you’re dealing with those last couple of pounds, the differences in a handful of calories have greater impact than when you’re starting out. For anyone trying to lose 20+ lbs., any steps you take toward a healthier lifestyle are going to be beneficial. Just get to the gym. Don’t worry about what you’re going to do when you get there, just get there and do something. Don’t worry about how many calories your meal has, just make sure the portion is reasonable (I like the handy guide of a serving of food as being roughly the palm of your hand) and that you have some fresh, unprocessed foods in there. Drink water instead of soda. With those changes alone, you will see a difference.
But back to the “eating more to lose weight” idea - I do find personally that when I can manage to eat around every three hours, and nothing late at night, I am the healthiest and lose the most. Mind you, that is not a full meal every three hours, it means a couple of snacks in between reasonable meals. I will be the first to admit it is not simple at all. When I was really good at this, I felt like I spent 90% of my non-working waking hours chopping vegetables. But man, I was a healthy motherfucker.
Oh? This isn’t a health tips thread? My mistake. Carry on.
Ultimately, I thought it was very simple. I ate too much of the wrong kinds of food and didn’t exercise. Everytime I ate something sugary, I wanted more. I switched to a nearly 100% whole foods diet, kicked my sugar habit and started exercising. It is more WORK (all that planning, shopping, packing, exercising, awkward social situations where I have to nearly get rude to turn down cake pushed on me by others) but it is SIMPLE.
Mind if I kick out a couple of other possible contributing factors? It seems to me portion sizes have gone up over the past few years, as have the number of all-you-can-eat buffet chains. One town near me has three of the latter – Ponderosa, Golden Corral, and Cici’s. A diner I ate at over the weekend had half pound hamburgers as it’s smallest size, unless there was something I overlooked on the kids menu. I’m not sure there was – as we were waiting for our food, the gentleman I was with noted a boy eating one of them and said, “Look at the size of that thing.” At the grocery store the other day, I noticed that four pre-packaged hamburgers in the meat section weighed about 1 1/4 pounds total. There’s an pub I sometimes go to for British food; their order of toad-in-the-hole is about four servings for me and about the size of what Mum makes for four people. For a while now I’ve been finding it ironic that, on the one hand we’re hearing more and more about the rise of obesity in America while I see ads for larger and larger portion sizes.
Something else surprised me a few years ago. I was having dinner with friends and left a hamburger partially uneaten because I was full. A friend whose battled her weight was surprised by this. She genuinely ether didn’t know how to recognize when she was full or didn’t get any indication from her body that she was full, therefore she usually finished everything on her plate. I don’t know how common this is, but I could see how it could lead to obesity coupled with increasing portion sizes.
That’s my brother in law - who is morbidly obese. He has tried diet after diet - and surgery, and phenphen, etc. But he is obsessive about cleaning his plate. To me, it looks like a form of OCD…even on a diet he will take a piece of bread to get the sauce off the plate. Sometimes, when he is done, you can’t tell there was food on it.
Add to that a lot of eating out, where he doesn’t control portion sizes, and there is a huge disconnect.
Silly.
Eat LESS. Exercise MORE.
Eat LESS. Exercise MORE.
Eat LESS. Exercise MORE.
Ya fat lazy poor person. 
I often battle the same compulsion. Yesterday, eating my lunch, I filled myself, but there was still food left. I had to force myself, though full, not to eat all the food I had. Same at restaurants. Whether its conditioning from youth or something else, I have trouble leaving food on a plate.
This is part of my problem too. Once I have given myself “permission” to have what I want at a dinner out (appetizers, entree and dessert), I don’t stop till I get all of it, even if I feel uncomfortably full. I think there is definitely something compulsive about it, as Dangerosa says. When I stick to a plan of soup and salad, I feel a quieter contentment about it, but it’s hard to avoid the voice that says Get high!
Yes, let’s ignore that this is exactly how she lost 55 pounds, and focus on the difficulty in shedding the last 13.
Eating less and exercising more got her from (at 5’7") 195lbs to 140lbs. According to the BMI chart, that’s going from just barely “obese” to the center of “normal”. Her goal, OTOH, was on the low side of normal, and at 127lbs, I’d consider that downright thin.
What the fuck to you people expect anyway? Eating better and exercising more got her from being WAY overweight to being a healthy sustainable weight, just a few pounds from her self selected target. That’s irrelevent of course, we should focus on what she had to do after acheiving 90% of her weight loss goal.
Keep telling everyone that it’s incredibly complex and difficult to lose weight. At least they’ll lighten their wallets by buying more diet books and 15min/day exercise tapes. 'Cause diet books and exercise fads have really helped our obesity problem.
Yep, in the complexity people hear what they want to hear…
“You should have a low calorie snack every few hours so that your metabolism doesn’t shut down” - Good advice. This means maybe a handful of whole wheat crackers - maybe a half a cup of popcorn. A few carrots. Some grapes. Maybe even some raisins.
What some people translate “I need to eat every few hours. I know I should eat a carrot, but the vending machine doesn’t have them. This snickers bar is only 200 calories.”
“You shouldn’t go on a no-fat diet. Your body needs some fat in order to properly metabolize.” This means that you should put a little oil on your salad, maybe drink 1% milk instead of skim, or maybe have a little peanut butter once in a while.
What some people translate “Some fat is good for me. I like my daily fat in the form of whipped cream and whole milk cheese.”
My original goal was 135, I wasn’t trying to lose weight when I went from 140 to 127. I was trying to explain how a smaller caloric deficit helped me because the body didn’t have to hold onto fat reserves for a perceived famine. A large caloric deficit stopped weight loss, a small caloric deficit permitted it to continue. I know a lot of people think the starvation theory is “hooey” but it matches my own experiences. So, I was eating LESS but less is relative. Most people think eating LESS = 1000 calories a day. In my experience, you can lose weight like that initially, but it will eventually get more difficult as the body begins to protect itself.
After suffering with my weight and diets and starving myself and all the other misery of 20 years of thinking diets had to be terrible, painful things, it was a relevation that it was so simple. Eat less crap, eat more whole foods (no more being hungry, no more deprivation), exercise. It IS simple. It is more WORK (it takes a lot of planning, shopping, packing lunches) but it is SIMPLE. As an added bonus, cutting out all that junk has energized me, I feel fantastic all the time.
Oh, I don’t know. Hey, here’s an idea: How about looking at the science of nutrition and applying it in a sensible way, instead of just boiling it down to a smug fucking platitude?
Why do you hate science?
Promoting the idea that losing weight is “complicated” is sensible? For who? Diet book writers, mostly. I don’t think that idea helps people who are actually fat and think they have to follow some complicated diet/exercise regimen to improve their fitness.
Why do you think diet books are so popular? It’s because we’ve become convinced that there is some trick to losing weight. That if we just followed the “right” plan, the fat will roll off. It’s not a trick, it’s hard work.
I love science. Conservation of Energy is a great concept, and it’s not going to change from year to year like the “science of nutrition”.
Agreed. Eating healthy is NOT complicated and doesn’t require an advanced degree and internet access. Physical activity and veggies are good for you, and sitting on the couch eating Pringles is bad for you. Everyone over the age of 5 knows this. Without exception.
I never advocated promoting weight loss as so complicated that people should throw themselves from tall buildings in despair. I’m advocating learning the facts of nutrition and developing a plan that works. How you can be against this is beyond me.
I just finished taking a 10-week course in weight loss. We covered exercise, proteins, fats, carbs, emotional issues, and a bunch of other stuff. It took all ten weeks, and it was chock full of useful information. Information that you apparently think is unnecessary.
Had I walked into the first class and the instructor smugly sneered “Eat less, exercise more”, then dismissed us, you can damn well bet that I would have asked for my money back. I also would have had words with the Department of Nutrition.
Ah, I get it. You think that the “science of nutrition” is all the fad diet books. You’re simply wrong about that. You might want to educate yourself on the subject before you so blithely dismiss it.
Granted, nutrition can be very complicated, but those levels of detail are not necessary to eat healthy and lose weight. You think people go to those classes and have revelations like “I had NO IDEA 5 Big Macs a day was making me fat!”?