Support Group for the Well-Endowed TM's

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

:slight_smile: Sorry, I just couldn’t resist such an opener. I am trying to lose weight. I have managed to lose about 30lbs since Feb1, but, unfortunately still have, :o dare I say it, about another 70lbs to go to reach my high school weight. It is really becoming a struggle right now, though. I have 2 skinny kids who eat like hungry horses most of the time. (I do feed them, honest I do! :eek: ) And my will power isn’t the greatest right now.

With Mr Bear gone so far away, I have way too much time on my hands, and can’t sleep, and end up fighting to keep my hands out of the fridge, and food out of my mouth. I think I will take a page out of Shayna’s book, and start sucking on water a lot more than I have been. I could really use some support, and anyone else who needs/wants to drop a few pounds, come on over, and I’ll do my best to help you out too.

This needs to remain an attack-free zone, so only good, helpful hints and warm fuzzies will be welcomed here. I have one friend who is trying to motivate me by his sarcasm and telling me ‘no excuses’ but, for me, it’s not working. I need positive reinforcement, not negative. I will try to come here at least once a day (which may be hard during the 2 weeks hubby is here, but I’ll do my best) and keep you updated on my progress.

I will also check on anyone else who joins me here, and we can swap ideas, encourage each other, and help each other through this. Evilbeth, you mentioned in Shayna’s smoking thread that you were losing weight, I would be honored if you would join me here, and we can help each other out.

Thank you in advance for supporting me, and anyone else who joins in, in trying to regain control of our lives and our waistlines.

PS. For those of you who are wondering, YES, I am. What God gave me. Sigh. Let me just add that too much of a good thing isn’t. If in doubt, just ask Mr Bear. :wink:

2

Hey Bear, can I play too? I gained 50 lbs after I was widowed, more or less on purpose,but it’s been almost exactly five years, and I’m starting to look at letting some of it go. I don’t want my high school weight, stick legs and flat chested, but 140 would be nice. I’m not doing anything special, yet, just kind of mentally charging myself up, and this forum might be just what I need. This and the chance of a dope-a-thon in Vegas in Sept(?) Count me in!!!

3

I need someone to check with, and I need to lose weight. I will reveal more when I have more time, but I can sure use the support.

4

Me too! Me too! I need to lose about 100 pounds or so. I’ve already lost 25, and need some support to keep going…y’all being here would be great!

5

At the moment, I’m not working on losing weight. I’m on my sixth day smoke-free. But you folks have been so tremendously supportive of me and all the others who have quit smoking recently, I just had to offer my support to you. Anything I can do, let me know, okay? :smiley:

6

Might I be of assistance? (Yeah, me, the current TUA of the board. {Troll Under Attack})

First, eat as much green salad as you choose. Especially before a meal. It fills you up, has like 50 calories and tastes good also.

Buy no fat pretzels. Oils and fats are about 100 calories a tablespoon. Pretzels are tasty.

Drink about a gallon of water a day. It flushes your system. (By the way, if you follow my advice about salads, you might experience increase – uh – trips to the can.)

Walk around your house now and then, walk outside around your house and examine the flowers.

Eat vegetable soups made with chicken or beef broth with the fat skimmed off. (Go easy on peas – they are fattening.)

Eat several small meals during the day. (SMALL!!) like two cups of good home made chicken broth and some rice crackers, a sandwich without mayo but loaded with mustard and any slice of meat, a cup of rice swimming in broth or a bunch of raw vegetables. THAT cuts down on your calories as well as your appetite.

You can eat anything normal, like pizza IF you eat a big salad first. Remember that. Like Iced Tea? Make it and drink all you want but, if you use sugar, try this. 50% of your normal amount of sugar, then sweeten to taste with something like sweet and low. You get the sugar taste but half the calories.

Use low calorie salad dressings. If you add tomato to many salads, they will ‘weep’ juice and actually contribute to a little bit of dressing added, making it seem like more.

Like cucumbers? Eat all you want. Try peeling and slicing them and soaking them in vinegar with a little salt. Eat all of the lettuce you want. (A huge head only contains like 60 calories.) Eat tons of celery. (It takes MORE calories to eat celery than the stuff provides.)

Celery sticks, cleaned and sliced, soaked in vinegar and water with some salt added, will draw up the flavoring. They’re tasty eaten crispy cold. A low fat yogurt ‘dip’ is great with them. (Also, wilted celery is even better to put in such a solution because they will plump up after a couple of hours and get crispy and absorb more of the flavoring.)

Tofu. Great stuff. It absorbs the flavors of anything it is mixed with. Dice it and add it to soups for texture, filler and protein. Toss it into salads. Serve it cut into thin ribbons daubed with Soya sauce or teriyaki in a salad as a tasty filler.

Like BBQ sauce? Low cal substitute here. Dilute the sauce with tomato sauce, it cuts the calories.

MMMMMMMM! Canned tomatoes go great with almost anything including rice.

Carrot sticks soaked in water or vinegar make great snacks.

Low cal sweets? Go to the diabetic section of your local grocery store and buy away. They have cookies and candies and pies. (Some of the items MIGHT take getting used to.) RITZ soda. All the ones I’ve seen are no calorie. I don’t think they make regular soda.

Fish. Broiled or poached. Great stuff. Artificial crab meat. Great stuff. Potatoes – great stuff because it is the flavorings added which contain most of the calories. Season with BUTTER BUDS bought at your grocery store and chives.

Spaghetti sauce, home made, is just fine if made with chicken or hamburger or as a complete vegetable sauce. DRAIN ALL OF THE FAT from searing the meat first. Can serve on rice, pasta, vegetables or tofu. Tofu can be added to the sauce to cut down on the meat.

Sub sandwich? Ask the maker to scrape out most of the center of the roll. Go easy on the Mayo, no oil. Everything else is fine. (Easier to eat also.) If you make your own, pack the hollows with lettuce and tomato. A sub contains a lot of bread. Scraping out the center removes a bunch of calories. (I learned that from a cool sub maker. He did that all of the time and later sold the ‘scrapings’ as bread crumbs, seasoned and unseasoned.)

Boiled chicken – all you want, which can be made into chicken salad.

French fries? Get the oven bake type.

Does this help? I hope so. I do this stuff when my weight goes up a tad too high.

7

Good Luck!

8

Joining in. I’ve dropped 30 pounds and stuck. I’ve never been regular-size in my adult life, so I have no notion of a goal. The doctor-advised 115 pounds is ridiculous; yes, I’m 5’3", yes, I’m small-boned, but I’m also extremely curvy. I think I weighed 115 when I was nine. So I have no idea what I’m going for, just less than I weigh now.

I have the added difficulty that weight loss doesn’t show on me (or gain, really). At my highest weight, 250, I wore a size 20. At 180 pounds I worse a size 18. Now I’m between those two weights, and a size 18. If I’m going to kill myself, I want it to show, dammit! Makes it hard not to lose interest in the whole process.

Regards and good luck to all, (and thanks Sentinel and kdorian)

Catrandom

9

Sentinel: Sounds like some really good stuff there (esprecially the sub ideas) but I do have one quick question: peas are fattening? I never heard that one before. What’s in their composition that makes them fattening? I positively adore peas, but I’ll cut back on them if need be.

10

Just wanted to add my support to the ladies (and any gentlemen who join in). No, I don’t need to lose any, but I support those who want to.

{{{{hugs}}}}

Sentinel - great advice.

One comment, be aware of the diabetic section for things sweetened with fructose. While fructose is an alternative sweetener that works for some diabetics, it is not low calorie. It is just a different form of sugar.

Good luck!

11

Hey everyone! I am definitely here for you, I lost a lot of weight about a year ago, and I would still like to lose 10-15 more, but it’s hard since I have to eat dining hall food and I HATE salad (am I the only one??)

My best advice is drink lots of water. When I was overweight, all I drank was soda. I dropped nearly ten pounds right off the bat by drinking all water, all the time. I peed a lot too! :slight_smile:

Also, treat yourself. Don’t deprive yourself completely…I still snack on cookies and ice cream, just in moderation. Eat 1-2 instead of 10.

Sherbet is a great alternative to ice cream.

Rold’s Gold pretzels are much better (and just as tasty) as chips. For sweet cravings, try animal crackers or caramel popcorn - I found a bag with only 5 grams of fat per serving.

Eat less. It sucks at first, but it gets easier. I was raised to always eat a meat, a veggie, and a side dish (like fries or noodles) and I always had to clear my plate. Now I only eat two things - meat and a veggie usually, and in smaller servings. My stomach shrunk pretty quickly. I used to be able to eat a Taco Bell 6-pack of tacos, now a chalupa fills me up.

If anyone wants to talk or anything, feel free to e-mail me at Nacho4Sara1@excite.com.

Good luck!!

12

Some good ideas there, Sentinal. I’m going to add my 2cents in.

Try to make the changes something that you can live with for the rest of your life. I don’t get parmesan cheese on my Italian food, or cheese on my fast-food burgers. I can do this happily for the rest of my life, and save a few fat grams whenever I have one of these meals.

If you eat salad, eat the dark green lettuce, not the iceberg. Iceberg is just water with a little bit of texture added. Note: I don’t like salads usually, because I don’t like dressing or lettuce. So I get what I like off the salad bar and put almost no dressing on (broccoli needs a little to cut the bitter).

Keep a diary of what you are eating. The best way to lose weight is to cut down your fat as much as possible; the diary can help you find places to cut fat down. Also, you can note when you are eating for some other reason than hunger, and come up with other methods of dealing with the problem.

I keep a canister of raisins at my desk for when I get what I call the “grim munchies” If you get these, determine what you want: sweet or salty, crunchy or chewy. Then you can find a low-calorie, low fat snack to satisfy you without adding too many calories. Be creative, another food that I’ve used for the grim munchies is Apple Cheerios ™.

Don’t deprive yourself completely of all the foods that you like. Instead, budget your fats and sweets; then enjoy them thoroughly when you eat them. Always make sure that when you eat these foods that you are getting exactly what you want, and that you aren’t eating out of habit or boredom. Make eating them a sensory trip. Concentrate on taste and texture as you’re eating; wring every bit of pleasure out of the experience that you can.

Avoid alcohol where possible - empty calories and it slows your metabolism down. When I was on phen-fen, I lost a pound a day at the start, except the days I drank (and I only drank one or two drinks at a time)

Finally, and I cannot stress this enough: exercise, exercise, exercise. You can’t lose weight without exercising. Note: when you start exercising you may actually gain some weight. This is a good thing, because muscle is denser than fat, and what you are doing is replacing fat with muscle. There are scales which measure body fat as well as weight.
Purplebear: since I believe exercise is more important than dieting, would you exercise for me? What say you?

13

I wanna add my thoughts too!!! I’ve been dieting since january and tried to lose slowly so i kept it off longer. I’m suceeding so far. i’ve gone from a size 16 to a size 10 and am happy but i want to change the shape i am. I have that lots on bottom none on top problem.

Also, to add to everyone else’s ideas, apples are negative on calories too. It takes more to digest them than they have in them. If that helps anyone?

I think it’s great ya’ll are doing this, Good Luck everyone!

14

Yes, I am currently on a weight loss quest. I’m not trying to get model-thin or get into a specific dress size, I am trying to get healthy enough to have a baby. Right now, I would qualify in the high risk area and I am not going to do that.

A friend from work and I are attending Weight Watchers meetings. I know, people tell me all the time that they only work sometimes and not permanantly etc. but I need the motivation and structure, not necessarily the dieting tips.

I have been drinking water. I hate water. No one understands that but I do. I have to force myself to drink it. I bought some sugar-free cinnamon gum to chew because it makes me drink water. If I crave a soda, I have a diet Dr. Pepper (Tastes more like regular Dr. Pepper, you know!)

I have lost 11 pounds in two weeks. I know that is only water weight but I was so excited I could have cried.

I have only been overweight for less than 10 years. I was always athletic in high school. I lettered in soccer for two years–I was in shape. But my senior year, I had large amounts of academic stress (munchies while studying, late night pizza-eating study sessions…) and that started it. Then I got the “Freshman 15” and proceeded to have a really self-esteem damaging relationship and I ate. I have roughly gained a dress size per year the past ten years. So, I have much work to do.

I have half-heartedly tried before but always failed because I didn’t have the will power. This time I tried a different tactic. I told everyone I was working on losing weight. Now, everytime I turn around someone else is asking me how I’m doing. Some people would hate that but I really need it. I need to do it for me, but I also need other people watching me because it is so easy to say, “Well, no one will know if I eat this whole pan of lasagna.” If everyone is curious about how I am progressing with my diet, then people will know if I eat a whole pan of lasagna so I won’t do it.

I thank those of you who have already added encouraging words to this thread. You guys are great. Just a message board, my big butt! (really!)

15

Am currently trying to get into the habit of an excersize bike every other night, but the excuses do seem to pile up. :frowning: I need to lose about 40lbs.

I think he said peas are fattening because they are very starchy. Starches are often converted to fat quickly in inactive people because they store well that way. :slight_smile: (Starches are long term energy sources, where sugar is short term. Sugar is for the fast burst of energy, Starch is for the slow burn, if I recall correctly. )

16

Me too y’all!

I am trying to lose weight, too.I gained 40 pounds with my last pregnancy (6 years ago) that I just haven’t been able to get rid of.Then, from last December to early March I somehow managed to gain another 30 pounds.YIKES.

So what are you all doing exercise-wise?
I have started weightlifting and trying to run/walk/crawl everyday if possible.I discovered that it’s a helluva lot harder to make this body run these days.I should have started this sooner, I guess.

What has worked for you?

17

I understand, evilbeth. Until about ten seconds ago, I thought I was the only person on the planet that felt that way about water!

I started drinking it last week, when I quit smoking. Shayna’s suggestion about the squirt bottles actually did help. I still don’t care for water, but it’s gotta be better than inhaling smoke, right?

Even if you’re not trying to lose weight, most doctors recommend what, eight 8-oz. glasses of water a day, something like that? Not that I ever did, but every time I trun around, I keep seeing those numbers. So that’s what I’m doing now. I think it’s keeping me from gaining weight right now. I could stand to lose some, that’s for sure, but I’m only going to tackle one thing at a time. If I can just maintain my weight right now, I’ll be happy!

18

I too am a bit too amply endowed. I really want to lose weight. Not for looks, though. My problem is that I can’t fit into my goshdarn kayak! :o

I gained 40 pounds after I went on antidepressants two years ago. That’s okay–I’d rather be fat than depressed.

Some great diet ideas posted above. I want to point out, though, that different things work for different people. For example, “many small meals” do not help me at all. But this works great for others.

Anyhoo, I just want to reiterate, for the benefit of the crowd, that all diet and exercise tips should be assumed to have a giant “YMMV” stamped across the page.

Thanks for starting this thread, purplebear!

19

Okay, what is the weight copacity for this elevator cause I am getting on too!
After having four children, the smallest weighing 8’3" and the largest weighing in at a meagar 10’8" I put on a few extra pounds that have to go!!!
I will say that I am a size 14 now which isn’t all that bad, but I am stuck here for two years and nothing has been able to help. My husband says crunches, but with all that is going on who has the time?
Any ideas on how to lose inches more than pounds would be greatly appreciated.
My sister has a wonderful diet that they put her on for hypoglycimia (SP?) and she lost a lot of weight with it. I will track her down tomorrow and post it as soon as I can.
The one thing my mother-in-law and I did was to stop buying junk food, and if we did by sweet things for the kids it was stuff that we didn’t care for so we weren’t tempted.
I did lose 15LBs. with slim fast jump start ™ Then I hit my plataeu.
I have also heard that changing your day to day routines can help. Taking stairs instead of elevators, or taking the long way around to where you need to be.
So ladies (so far), and gentlemen let’s do this! On with positive thinking. Like they used to tell us in or morning huddle meeting for work, “I don’t want to hear no stinking thinking!” GOOOOOOOOOOOOO TEEEEEEEEAAM!!

20

WOW! Thank you for all of the wonderful responses. I welcome all of you gladly. Dragonlady, Sassy, Falcon, thank you so much. Welcome aboard. Christi, thank you so much for your words of support, I’m sure we’ll all need them some days.

Sentinel, thank you so much for the advice. It makes a lot of sense, and most of it I am already trying to do now. That’s how I lost the first 30lbs. I didn’t know that about peas, though, that is new to me. I hadn’t thought about sub sandwiches like that either.

kdorian, thank you so much for your support.

Catrandom, welcome aboard! I, too have that ‘problem’. Even my doctor was surprised at how much I weigh, compared to how much I look like I weigh. The downside of that for me at least, is that’s how I was able to fool myself and gain so much in the first place.

Green Bean! I almost missed you. I like this new format! I was just previewing, and happened to notice that you snuck in on me. Welcome! And, thank you, you are quite welcome.

Irishman, thank you so much, dear. May I say, no, you certainly don’t need to lose any weight! You look just fine to me. Good thing to remember about the fructose, you are correct.

Nacho4Sara, thank you, good advice also. Welcome aboard!

Zyada, thank you so much for your advice. And, yes, of course, I will walk for you every day. And, I’m looking for a wateraerobics class to join. I have come to agree, without excercise, losing weight will be much harder to do.