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How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

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Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#131

Post by patrickk »

ef4 wrote: post #71
eshvk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. You lose weight by eating less calories than your body uses. (As a corollary, you almost definitely consume more calories than you think you do. Get a calorie-counting app.) True. For those who find it a pain to use one, I recommend sticking with it for a few months at least initially. After a while, your mind gets attuned to the idea of how much food is enough for you to be satiated. So don't obsess about getti…

> For those who find it a pain to use [a calorie-counting app], I recommend sticking with it for a few months at least initially. After a while, your mind gets attuned to the idea of how much food is enough for you to be satiated. But satiation is a built-in feature of your body. A healthy human body counts calories automatically, and governs appetite and metabolism appropriately to keep body weight in a narrow targe…

> But satiation is a built-in feature of your body. A healthy human body counts calories automatically, and governs appetite and metabolism appropriately to keep body weight in a narrow target range.

It's not just the human body, but the mind as well.

Sometimes I'd get engrossed in a piece of work or reading something interesting and forget to eat for hours. Then I'd get hunger pangs, and eat some sugary crap or something laden in saturated fat (this often happened late in the evenings. Eating late in the evening is a terrible habit, as the carbs in your food is more likely to metabolise to fat.)

Now I find by simply calorie counting (MyFitnessPal is amazing, free, scans barcodes, you enter your goals etc.) and planning meals so that I have x4 relative low calorie meals (typically 400-600 calories) in a day, with no hunger pangs. I never feel like reaching for that 1200+ calorie pizza at 10pm anymore. It's simple, no bullshit, you don't have to massively overhaul your diet or starve yourself. Anyone could do it if they put their mind to it. I'm about a month into this new regime and I'm never going back.

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#132

Post by Dewie »

jmduke wrote: post #32

There's a massive signal-to-noise issue in the fitness world, particularly because there's so much value to be made just by making some noise. For anyone reading this post and inspired to lose weight, I recommend you keep the following basic tenets in mind when researching a plan/regimen: 1. You lose weight by eating less calories than your body uses. (As a corollary, you almost definitely consume more calories than…

> There's a massive signal-to-noise issue in the fitness world, particularly because there's so much value to be made just by making some noise.

Yes, there are a lot of varying information out there, and a lot of those are conflicting. Case in point: just look at how many replies you got where people are disagreeing with you and each other about your recommendations... ;)

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#133

Post by yummyfajitas »

calanya wrote: post #110
yummyfajitas wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is true, why don't we become incredibly fat or skinny over time? It would require incredible precision to maintain weight. But a lot of people seem to be able to do it with no effort... Because the amount you require for maintenance is proportional to your bodyweight. If you eat more than you need, you become fatter. As you become fatter, the amount of calories you need for maintenance goes up as well. The ca…

The Harris-Benedict study is from 1919 on a population of 239 subjects . I'm just wondering - Do you know if it has been re-evaluated in more recent years, and was found valid?

Last time I looked into it was a years back when I had access to a university library. I dug up a couple of textbooks on sports medicine, they all generally agreed that Harris-Benedict was a good first order approximation.

In practice, it's good enough for a fat guy trying to get thin. It might not be good enough for a heavyweight trying to get down to cruiserweight without losing strength.

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#134

Post by justindhill »

dalmaer wrote: post #48
justindhill wrote: post #13

Am I the only person who enjoyed reading this guy's story? I'm happy that he's found a lifestyle that works for him. The amount of skepticism and criticism in this thread is off the charts...

I appreciate that. It is very interesting to see people jump on what I did or even more did not say in one post about a personal experience. I think people need to realize that: People are just trying their best! Holy negativity. And in that I appreciate your comment Justin :)

Sure thing fella. Keep on truckin'. :)

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#135

Post by yummyfajitas »

ef4 wrote: post #112
yummyfajitas wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is true, why don't we become incredibly fat or skinny over time? It would require incredible precision to maintain weight. But a lot of people seem to be able to do it with no effort... Because the amount you require for maintenance is proportional to your bodyweight. If you eat more than you need, you become fatter. As you become fatter, the amount of calories you need for maintenance goes up as well. The ca…

That's all true, but still irrelevant to the question of fixing the obesity epidemic. "Calories eaten per day" is not a free variable. It's governed by a control loop within the brain. In a healthy person, appetite adjusts to compensate for calorie surplus or deficit. We have an epidemic because that control loop is getting damaged. People have a hard time discussing this because they treat it as a moral issue. But i…

Your theories about other mammals are utterly wrong - many mammals get fat in the summer and come close to starving during the winter.

As for the rest of your post, I'm not sure what you are trying to say. The human brain is made of biochemistry, so therefore choosing to eat less is a biochemistry problem? Um, sure, I guess.

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#136

Post by shavingspiders »

adventured wrote: post #77
rjh29 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of skinny people out there with rubbish diets, packed with carbs and low in protein.... while carbs undeniably cause hunger compared to fats and protein, there is definitely an individual variation in appetite that diet cannot completely make up for.

I was one of those hyper skinny people. There are only two reasons for it: 1) a temporarily very high metabolism that will fade with age 2) how many calories being consumed in relation to how fast your body burns I couldn't gain a pound of weight no matter how much crap I ate, right up to about the age of 25. So I ate anything at any time, all the time. I then proceeded to gradually gain 40 pounds over seven years, f…

I don't know if you've visited r/fitness or r/gainit, but metabolism really only accounts for a variance in about 200 calories. The big thing holding skinny people back is that they pretty much aren't eating enough of the good stuff - sure a skinny person might eat 3 cheeseburgers in a sitting but it doesn't help that their only exercise is cardio, or that it's the only substantial thing they actually eat all day. Many self professed skinnyfat people who claim they eat like a horse are shocked to find that they aren't consuming nearly as much calories as they think they are when it's all being tracked.

Did you actually religiously track your calories in/out?

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#137

Post by dmourati »

iooi wrote: post #122

Figured I might as well take advantage of this thread to ask the opposite question: what is the best way to gain weight? I stopped gaining weight at around 17 and have weighed 120 since. I wish I could eat more but I am just not that hungry every day, it's hard getting in my 3 meals.

http://www.scrawnytobrawny.com/

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#138

Post by dasil003 »

Proleps wrote: post #121
vmarsy wrote: post #78

Interesting post, the author can be proud. Not being from the united states, and now living there since one year , here is my 2 cent , I think these are the most important points of the post and my own advices: - Drink water only, no soda, even diet coke and whatnot. - Avoid sugars (I'd say especially high corn fructose syrup). - Eat vegetables, cooked in good olive oil in a pan, it's really good. I don't know about…

> no soda, even diet coke and whatnot. Why?, there are a lot of diet sodas that do not contain any calories. > Avoid too salty food (preprocessed food will be too salty.) Why, salt doesn't contain any calories. Going on a diet is very hard in the first place, giving up these two things doesn't seem to make much sense. It will only make a difficult lifestyle change even more difficult.

Not gonna argue about salt per se, but how can diet soda be good for you? So it doesn't have calories, but what does it have to make it taste that way? Certainly nothing that is of any use to your body, and most likely is harmful in subtle ways that we won't find out for years if ever.

What is so bad about just drinking water with the occasional tea or coffee if you really need a stimulant?

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#139

Post by cwzwarich »

VLM wrote: post #111
cwzwarich wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really pisses people off because there's no diet industry personalities to make money, no guilt inducing neo-puritanism, no weird expensive foods to buy. Grains and legumes are a lot less expensive than grass-fed beef.

So... eat a carrot? I will admit there is a societal trend to just relabel high meat low carb atkins type diets as paleo, and be done with it. That doesn't mean the paleo diet is "eat organic steaks every night". As a programmer/hacker community the best analogy I can give is my impression of a venn diagram of a atkins/low carb type diet is the circle for the diet mostly contains meat and not much else. And the venn…

I was just pointing out that a paleo diet still has some expensive food choices. If you don't eat grains, legumes, or dairy regularly then you're probably going to have to eat meat or eggs for protein, both of which are considerably more expensive than vegan sources of protein. This is especially true if you try to go a step further and try to find grass-fed beef or free-range chickens.

Re: How I have lost over 100 pounds and don’t know how

#140

Post by cwzwarich »

voidlogic wrote: post #106
Someone wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, and easier for some: put low calory food in front of you. It may be possible to grow fat from eating raw celery and tomatoes, but it certainly is harder than growing fat from eating burgers and chocolate.

>It may be possible to grow fat from eating raw celery and tomatoes Doing this with celery will be more difficult as it takes more energy to digest than is gained from it. I had a humorous image in my mind of someone trying to get fat via only veggies, imagine the volume of food they would have to eat every day! Examples: The Kimchi I had with lunch was 15 calories, the half bag of russels sprout I had last night (ex…

> Examples: The Kimchi I had with lunch was 15 calories, the half bag of russels sprout I had last night (excluding the oil oil cooked in) 130 calories.

I'm not one of the downvoters, but "satiety of eating unrestricted quantities of vegetables outweighs any caloric intake" approach only works if you don't add fats or sugar sauces.

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