I was 115lb until i was 30, then 125 until I was 40.
My secret is very, very simple but I don’t think women can do it. I’ve never met a woman who’s even come close: I forget to eat and I can sleep hungry. I work on stuff or play games or watch tv or movies and then it’s time to sleep. I’m so tired I can sleep through hunger.
Eat more plants.
In general, the closer a food is to its natural state, the better, and the more processed it is, the worse it is for you and your waistline.
Beyond that, keep the eating out to a minimum, don’t keep sweets, chips, and other snacks around the house, and keep lots of fruits and veggies around. Even if a lot of the produce goes bad, if you eat a decent amount of it, you’ll be better for it. You can’t eat it if it’s not there.
Here’s the easy formula: eat fewer calories, and exercise regularly. It’s foolproof.
Here’s the hard part: the willpower to do the easy part. That has to come from within, but if you can stick to it, burning more calories than you are taking in will always result in lost weight.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Develop the changes to your lifestyle and it will benefit you in the long run, over some goal to lose ‘x’ pounds by ‘y’ date.
If you’re overweight and having trouble losing weight, you’d almost definitely benefit from cutting your carb intake. I won’t advise going full Atkins, because I’ve never done it myself, but eliminating grains and refined sugar from my diet does, after a few days, reduce my appetite dramatically. This makes it possible to stop snacking between meals and all that other great stuff that some people can do effortlessly. And that, if done for a long long time, leads to (slow) weight loss.
[QUOTE=Superhal;17447878
My secret is very, very simple but I don’t think women can do it. I’ve never met a woman who’s even come close: I forget to eat and I can sleep hungry. .[/QUOTE]
Why don’t you think women can do this? I agree it’s not common. But I am a woman and I most definitely forget to eat sometimes, or can’t be bothered, and going to sleep hungry (a relative term I guess) is not a problem.
Mind you I love food. Adore it, really. And cooking. But sometimes I get preoccupied or busy and forget to eat. Also, I rather like the feeling of being hungry sometimes. That one is hard to explain. But compared to feeling too full or bloated, it’s definitely preferable IMHO.
So, you’ve just “met” a woman online who forgets to eat at times, and doesn’t mind going to sleep after missing dinner.
Also I should add, I rarely snack. Growing up (in Europe mostly, if it makes a difference), eating between meals wasn’t done, but now it seems quite common.
Another vote for Weight Watchers. I’ve lost over 60 pounds in a year and, after having weight issues my whole life almost (I’m 46), this is the first time ever that I’ve…
Actually changed how I eat. No binging, no desiring foods anymore that are bad for me (for the most part), no eating until I’m about to pop.
I’m not constantly hungry. Like stated above, there’s so much free stuff and points to work within, I very seldom feel anything but sated. I mean, you apart from however many points you get each day, you get an additional 49 each week. It’s amazing how much stuff you’re ‘allowed’ to have if you want it.
You’re not deprived in any way. If I absolutely have to eat a Girl Scout cookie, I can. All I have to do is keep up with the points. Hell, if I want to go off for the whole day, it’s easy as pie to go right back on the next.
It’s the simplest program I’ve ever used. If you can plot how much fat, protein, carbs and fiber something has into a WW calculator (available for about $5 at any meeting), you can do this.
And most importantly for me, I’m no longer obsessed with my weight from a strictly cosmetic point of view. I’ve never done any diet that I couldn’t tell you down to the second how much I weighed and how quickly I’d be down to a size 7, this is the first time ever that there’s been whole periods of time when I simply couldn’t remember where I was at on the scale. It’s a bigger deal for me now to feel and be healthy than anything else. My cholesterol and blood sugar is good, I’ve gone off all my blood pressure medications and I can walk almost three miles a day. So, this has been a godsend for me.
Also, as Scarlett, eating out really is that difficult. If you subscribe to their service online, they have tons of restaurant point information. In addition to that, I have an app called HealthyOut that covers a lot more. Both are awesome and I can’t recommend Weight Watchers enough. Between me and two family members, we’ve lost over 110 pounds. If you’re okay with doing it slowly, cheaply and easily, it’s the best way to go. In my opinion.
Here’s another example of how to eat out: Breakfast. Restaurant breakfasts can be killer.
But I have a group of friends who meet on Saturday mornings for a short run/walk, each to his or her own distance/ability, no more than a few miles. Afterward we have breakfast at Perkins. You know, with all the huge breakfast platters.
Here’s my weekly Saturday breakfast:
Build Your Own Omelet (it’s huge): Egg Beaters (3 points) with broccoli, mushrooms, tomatoes, spinach (all 0 points). Fruit (it’s a mix of apples, grapes, pineapple) instead of potatoes (0 points). And instead of pancakes or toast, I get a muffin to go and take it home to Mr. S. (He’s a skinny twerp and needs the calories. No, I haven’t killed him yet. 
) Water or tea to drink. A huge yummy breakfast, all for THREE FRIGGIN’ POINTS! And I just went for a run too. So I start my weekend “in the hole” pointswise. Yay me!
Really you answered your own op in the op, as pointed out. The reason you’ve gained? All the great restaurants around you. Serving sizes, especially of refined carb and high fat foods, are absurd. It is tasty food and going well past enough to not be hungry is a virtual certainty. Eating healthy out is possible but very difficult.
From what you posted in your op you are not a long time overweight or obese individual. You changed something, eating out a lot more, and the consequence is that you have put on fat. Sounds like you knew how to eat healthy at home (you know the drill - “real food, not too much, mostly plants” to quote Pollan, or hell any plan that avoids highly processed and refined foods made by Big Food Inc whatever you want to label it, be it Atkins, low carb, Paleo, veganism, or OogaBooga) and regular exercise. Get back to it and your newly found excess weight won’t get a chance to put down roots. Don’t let that fat get comfortable though … once it feels at home it is harder to evict.
Overheard at a poker table:
A: My phone battery is almost dead.
B: You can charge it at the table.
A: That’s awesome!
C: Well, it’s kind of a mixed blessing, usually all the calls people get are their wives telling them they have to leave the table.
B: Well, it could be an emergency.
C: Like, she’s hungry?
My #1 rule when I wanted to lose weight was to nutritionally justify everything I ate. That mostly means avoiding carbohydrates that don’t come with a lot of other nutritional benefits, such as bread, pasta, potato, etc. You don’t have to cut them out, but try to keep the portions small and eat them with other things. For example, I would eat tortillas, but only if they were wrapped around a lot of vegetables, protein and fibre, meaning I only needed one or maybe two for a filling meal. You don’t need to go hungry at all, but you do need the motivation to resist some of the more gratifying foods.
This is your cite? That’s it? Really?
All righty then. Carry on.
Another tip for eating out: Ask for a takeout box to be brought with the food. When the food arrives, put half of your meal in the box right away. Out of sight, out of mind. Have it for lunch tomorrow. Don’t tell yourself you’ll eat half and THEN put the other half away. That never works.
A slight exception might be that I might eat all the veggies and just put away half of the meat and potato. I can make more veggies at home to go with it.
Better yet, more and more restaurants are offering steamed veggies as one of the “potato” choices. And don’t be afraid to ask for substitutions. My WW leader will ask for pasta primavera with half the pasta and double the veggies. Back when I still got carbs with my Perkins breakfast, I asked to have an English muffin instead of toast or pancakes, because the points were lower. Ask for sauces and dressings on the side, or to be left off entirely. Ask for items to be grilled dry or with minimal butter or margarine. Ask them to leave the onion rings off the top of your steak. Ask ask ask.
Precisely.
I don’t even get what his “cite” is supposed to imply. Being able to go a night without eating dinner doesn’t equal never feeling hungry.
Why it might matter is an even bigger mystery.
http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/
I agree with other posters that you’ve got to create sustainable, effective eating patterns for yourself. For me, this has meant cutting out wheat entirely, and I keep things fairly strictly paleo.
I think it’s virtually impossible to be fat in our society if you strictly cut out wheat. That alone deletes 95% of junk and processed food, let alone the actual biological benefit of eliminating the wheat.
I haven’t missed it at all. I don’t feel hungry all the time now, and the hunger feels different. Going paleo changes on a deep level how you relate to food at the biochemical level.
And corn. Evil stuff!
Many people binge and make bad food choices when eating by themselves because no one is there to witness and judge them.
Stop drinking diet drinks. I once cut out Diet Coke for 2 months (drank water instead) and lost 20 pounds.