I’ve never heard that before. And I shouted nothing.
Yep. And all of those are perfectly acceptable breakfast foods. But salmon and buttered rice? Not so much.
I used shout for hyperbole.
You never knew it was bad manners to tell someone you think the food they like is yucky? My teenage kids knew this from toddlerhood. You could say ‘no thank you’ or ‘I don’t care for some’ but never ever ‘yuck’ when offered food.
ETA: Acceptable breakfast foods? Obviously very acceptable as someone right in this thread chooses it. My list shows how arbitrary food categories can be. I know lots of folks who eat leftover inner type foods for breakfast.
I’ve talked about weight loss some before but have never really posted a meal plan. Come to think of it one of the biggest complaints I had when I started losing weight years ago is it was very hard to find sample meal plans, instead people insist on talking in generalities and giving you very broad “meal suggestions” that don’t really do anything to show you what to actually eat.
I lost around 60 pounds as well, mostly following this standard diet:
Breakfast: 1 cup oats, 1 cup egg whites (I use egg beaters), 1 cup 2% milk
AM Snack: 1 serving of fruit (almost always a banana or apple due to their ease of carry and etc.)
Lunch: 1 cup (measured dry, before cooking) brown rice, 2 servings vegetable, ~6 oz chicken breast. I cook all of this the night before and reheat at work, the vegetables are usually something frozen I’ll cook a whole bag of and eat over a few days reheated (typically broccoli, green beans, peas, vegetable medleys etc.)
PM Snack: 1 scoop Whey Protein Isolate (in water–this has the taste of death), 1 can tuna
Dinner: 1 cup brown rice, 2 servings vegetable, 6 oz chicken breast, 1 tbsp olive oil (usually mixed into rice)
Evening snack: 1 container no-fat Greek Yogurt
It usually totals 2200-2400 calories, with around 35% protein, 50% carb, 20% fat.
Thank you. It may surprise some people, but any food item can be eaten any time of the day. And if a food combination works for lunch and dinner, why wouldn’t it work for breakfast?
Ambivalid, salmon and fish is a common breakfast combination outside of the US. When I visited Amsterdam, the continental breakfast the hotel served up was salmon and fish.
Lox and bagels, kippers and eggs, salmon and rice…delicious delicious delicious.
To be fair, it is unlikely he follows it either:
Banana (105)
Greek Yogurt (130)
6" Sandwich (~200)
3 Tablespoons Olive Oil (360)
Vegetables (200?)
8 Oz Chicken Breast (280)
Total: 1275 Calories
Caloric requirements for 187 pound man: ~2200
I’ve been losing weight as well, and have gone from about 205 to about 197 over the past month and a half. I lift weights 6x a week, run 3-4x a week, and try to keep my daily calories at 2000. IMHO any diet with rules, foods you can’t eat, or any other tricks just isn’t going to work. You should aim to meet your daily intake needs, and that’s it. A good rule of thumb is at least .5g of fat and protein per lb of body weight. More protein if you are lifting weights or other intense exercise. The rest of your calories can come from carbs or more fat/protein, as long as it is not crazy unbalanced. A variety of fruits and vegetables should be consumed as well to get necessary vitamins and nutrients.
I recommend using a web or phone based app to track everything, and I mean everything, you eat. Measure/count out loose items like nuts, chips, cookies and other snacks. Get the weight of the meat from the packaging. This way you will know exactly how many calories you are eating and if you are getting the right mixture of fat, protein, and carbs. Here is one day of what I eat:
BFast: 2 fried eggs, 1 cup of kidney beans, 1 Italian Sausage
Lunch/Dinner: 1 ear of corn, 16 ounches of chicken breast, Sweet potato, and a bottled sauce
Snacks/2nd Dinner: 1 Banana, 1 yogurt, 2 carrots, 2 puddings, and 1/2 pound strawberries
I tend to eat two bigger meals a day and then have a snack in the evening. It doesn’t really matter.
I learn something every day…
Thanks for doing the math for me. I think the sandwich has a few more calories the way I order it and I probably use more olive oil than I thought based on the measurements I looked at today. I eat some other stuff too but not much and there isn’t any regular pattern. I had a couple (as in two exactly) of Girl Scout cookies last night and I eat a lot more when I go out with other people to restaurants (a couple of times a week). I try to keep it healthy but it ends up being a lot more than I eat when I just follow my normal pattern. The list I gave applies to about five out of seven days of the week with a few allowances for things like birthday cakes or whatever else people want you to eat.
I also eat a lot more when I go on vacation a few times a year. There isn’t any specific prohibition of a given food. It is all about the total picture. I just start cutting back the second I feel like I am gaining any significant amount of weight.
Not even outside the US.
Growing up in Western NY, Sunday breakfast was bagels, cream cheese, lox, pickled herring, smoked white fish and fruit.
I’m glad you came clean, Shagnasty. Not that I think you were being intentionally deceitful, but it is a little rich to say, “I’ve been sustaining myself on sticks and berries and I lost 60 pounds! So don’t tell me it can’t be done!” Who is saying they wouldn’t be able to lose 60 pounds on a diet composed of mostly kale?
What would be especially meaningful to people is seeing how they can eat sticks, berries, chips, popcorn, pizza, cookies and STILL lose 60 pounds. And better yet, keep it off.
shrug
2200 calories is for a 187 pound man that does little to no exercise. Moderate exercise, i.e. walking, 3x per week bumps that up to 2500. So realistically, you are likely underestimating your average daily caloric intake by half. Which underscores my point. People suck hard at estimating their caloric intake. The only reliable way is to measure and record everything you eat.
The lightest 6" Subway Sandwich clocks in at 280 calories, but many of them are in the 450-500 range. Cheese adds another 40, and some of the fat-free sauces (honey mustard, onion) have a notable calorie load. If he’s getting a tuna sub with cheese and honey mustard, he’s probably looking more like 650.
True but I am not really concerned about the number of calories I eat. That isn’t the point and the way that most people get into trouble. It is only the end result that matters. I set my daily diet really low in calories so that there is wiggle room for when I do go out or someone has a celebration. I have a desk job but still walk a lot. If I set my daily diet at near 2500 calories, any time I went over that, I would be storing it somewhere like a reverse debt that is hard to get out of. It doesn’t take much of that to add up significantly over time. It is much easier in American society to eat a little more if you set the baseline low rather than come up with a way to calculate calories perfectly for each and every day so that you never go over.
Most people that are failing at this are setting their baseline food intake too high to take into account the inevitable extra intake. It only take an extra cookie a day to add up to significant weight gain over time.
Oops. I was looking at the serving size instead of calories. I thought he meant the veggie delight, which clocks in at 230.
If it works for you, then great. But it’s not exactly a very detailed nutritional strategy. Essentially what you are saying is eat a very small amount every so often to make up for days where you eat a lot. Which obviously will work if you do the numbers right, but where is the strategy to get the numbers right? What you are suggesting is that people offset their high caloric days with low ones to average out to their daily requirements. If they could do that, they wouldn’t be fat in the first place.
I eat 1350 calories a day (I’m 5’4", 153 lbs [as of this morning!])-- I have to eat 4 servings of grains (starchy vegetables are included in this group), minimum 3 servings of non-starchy vegetables, 2 fruits, 2 dairy, 8 oz. protein (but I almost always go over), and 4 fats.
Typical day:
Breakfast
*Sandwich made with 100-calorie high-fiber English muffin, .5 oz slice of cheese, 2 oz lunchmeat, bell pepper slices, mustard
*1/2 cup fat free cottage cheese
*Tea with splenda and a splash of milk
Snack
Baby bell peppers, baby carrots; 15 pistachios or 12 almonds
Lunch
*Soup with beans, meat of some kind, and veggies (today I made a great soup with black beans, ham, swiss chard, heirloom tomatoes, bell peppers, carrots, and turnips, and will take that to lunch for the next week)
*1/2 cup non-fat plain Greek yogurt with 1 TB flaxseed, sugar-free jam, and blueberries
*Diet soda
Dinner
*Diet soda or non-caloric flavored seltzer water
*6 oz. chicken breast in low-calorie marinade
*All the non-starchy vegetables I want (I’m very fond of kale and swiss chard)
*Some kind of starchy vegetable, like 1/2 c. bean salad;
OR
*1/2 cup frozen yogurt (counts as 1 grain serving + 1 fat)
(I’ve been going with the frozen yogurt almost every day, and I think that’s hurting my weight loss – gonna have to make that a once-a-week treat)
Snack
*1 high-fiber flatbread cracker with 1 TB peanut butter and 1/2 banana and a little honey drizzled on top OR 1 oz. cheese and lunchmeat OR 1 oz. cheese and an apple OR something else depending on what food groups I need to hit the quota on that day
*Decaf tea with splenda and milk
In my personal experience, it only takes a couple of days of overeating to retrain your hunger cues so that you’re inappropriately hungry even when you’ve eaten enough food. I’ve known a few people who could follow the whole “eat what I want until I notice my pants are getting a little tight and then cut back until I lose some” method – my dad being one of them – but I don’t think this is going to be effective for the majority of people, mostly because without carefully measuring your caloric intake, it’s easy to think, “I’m not eating very much” when actually you’re still overeating your caloric needs.
In my opinion anyway.
Full disclosure, I stopped caring about my weight entirely when I started running. As long as I can still easily run at least a few miles, I don’t really care how much I weigh.
All I am saying is that the average American diet is way to high on the calorie load to support any upward fluctuations if at all. That is why so many people are fat. You have to aim low on a daily basis to support any additional intake. Once you adjust your daily intake low, you should be able to tell when you start edging upwards just by the way you feel. Cutting all all foods like soda seems to help with that. There is certainly no danger of starvation for anyone in the U.S. I almost never feel hungry because I eat so many high volume vegetables but, if I do, I just pick something healthy and eat that too. It isn’t something I think about much. I have maintained a stable weight for three years doing that.
Again, I’m not arguing that what you do doesn’t or won’t work. It’s what millions of non-fat people do. The problem is that fat people aren’t able to do what you suggest. That’s why they’re fat. If they were able to simply self moderate then they would not be overweight in the first place.
Speaking as someone who got fat, if fat people do not fundamentally alter the way they do things they cannot lose weight. Dieting is basically a way to yo-yo your weight, if you don’t make some kind of long term shift in how you eat you will never lose permanent weight.
For me, it was rigorous meal planning, in advance, with no allowable deviations. I also weigh myself every day and maintain a moving average of my weight, any upward trend results in aggressive cutting of calories until the trend reverses.
That’s not the change everyone needs to make, but if you don’t change innate attitudes on eating and behavior you’ll always be fat. That’s precisely why so many people who get fat probably never lose the weight.
It’s all about the consistency. Yeah, I lost a bunch on Atkins, then it came back. What worked in the end was finding a very basic selection of foods I could stand to have all the time. My budget dictated that it be cheap, but low on the carbs, because my body gets hungry again ver quickly on carbs. A diet almost entirely made of cabbage, eggs, tuna, peanuts, Sriracha, plain yogurt, and protein powder ( given to me by a bodybuilder roommate who buys in bulk) fixed the weight issue and the budget. Now a salad a meal, and I’m satisfied and energy filled all day.
The other thing that works is finding a time to work out that basically forces you to actually do it. When it’s barely 4:30 in the morning and you’re arriving at the gym, you have no excuse but to work out before work. Otherwise, what’s the point in being up at an insane hour? Sounds mad, but works for me.
Disclaimer: might not work for those who abhor monotonous diets and mornings.