Truant Wrote:
[quote]I just lost 7-8kg recently just by keeping a diary of everything I eat/drink.
[/quote]
:bravo: :bravo:
Great job Truant. Keep it up.
Thanks Truant… this looks like a good tool to help me stay honest.
[quote=“p32rad”][quote=“Juba”]See also “Help Blob” (a short but classic thread, IMHO).
p.s. Any ideas how to get my girlfriend to shed weight? She is pretty blobbed out. I can’t even persuade her to walk to church and back once a week.[/quote]
First of all, if your girlfriend is happy with her body, then leave it alone. :fume:
[/quote]
Just because the person he loves has gotten fat does not mean he wants to be with a fat person.
Loving your partner doesn’t make you blind.
[quote=“SuchAFob”][quote=“p32rad”][quote=“Juba”]See also “Help Blob” (a short but classic thread, IMHO).
p.s. Any ideas how to get my girlfriend to shed weight? She is pretty blobbed out. I can’t even persuade her to walk to church and back once a week.[/quote]
First of all, if your girlfriend is happy with her body, then leave it alone. :fume:
[/quote]
Just because the person he loves has gotten fat does not mean he wants to be with a fat person.
Loving your partner doesn’t make you blind.[/quote]
Totally agree.
Cook/eat more at home.
Prepare her wholesome meals. Make her yummy, healthy lunches and pack them into her lunchbox! 
Some people get blobbed out cause they eat when they’re bored. Some eat when they’re upset. If she’s bored, find fun things to do together, or try to get her to take up a hobby that keeps her hands busy or something. If she eats when she’s unhappy, then try to keep her happy! 
I find that eating right makes a huge difference. Esp. when you start out eating absolute junk most of the time. I think I’ve lost maybe ten pounds the past month by staying away from greasy shite and sweets generally. I also find it lessens mood fluctuations.
Oatmeal with fruit and a little milk for breakfast.
Half bowl rice with veggies and a little fish for lunch.Bread or more rice to top it off if still hungry and can’t resist.
Big salad with beans, tofu, corn, a little meat etc… for dinner.
Fruit for snacks. Or Ice-cream, chocolate etc…if you really need it, just not every day.
I do that most of the week and come Friday and Saturday I let loose on whatever I like.
Gives something to look forward to and you won’t feel psychologically that you are “On a diet”…and won’t feel bad after eating it. Think of it as a reward for the weight loss you accomplished.
Try eating slowly and don’t do grocery shopping when hungry.
If the fridge is big enough to hold a 250 pound person inside then it will probably end up creating one. My fridge is only big enough to keep my fruits and veggies and not alot more than that.
Whenever you lose a few kg, than as a reward go out and buy some nice expensive food item for yourself. I spent over 1,500 for some nice olive oil and balsamic vinegar recently. That will help me lose more wieght with the salads I use it on.
Excercise is of course good.
I’ve never read this book, but it comes up in the book “Your Money Or Your Life” (as an anology to money.)
The name: [Diet’s Don’t Work]
And here were the four rules that were listed in the book to get off of the “diet merry go round.”
[ul][li]Eat when you’re hungry.[/li]
[li]Eat exactly what your body wants.[/li]
[li]Eat each bite consciously[/li]
[li]Stop when your body has had enough.[/li][/ul]
I bet this pretty much some up the book (and some Amazon reviewers would agree.) They seem like 4 good tips anyway (even if just “common sense.”)
[quote=“miltownkid”][ul]
[li]Eat when you’re hungry.[/li]
[li]Eat exactly what your body wants.[/li]
[li]Eat each bite consciously[/li]
[li]Stop when your body has had enough.[/li][/ul]
[/quote]
I think alot of people would translate that as?:
I’m hungry all the time.
It wants burgers, chips, coke and ice-cream.
mmmm…each bite tastes great.
hmm, still hungry, one more donut will do.
[quote=“Hongda”][quote=“miltownkid”][ul]
[li]Eat when you’re hungry.[/li]
[li]Eat exactly what your body wants.[/li]
[li]Eat each bite consciously[/li]
[li]Stop when your body has had enough.[/li][/ul]
[/quote]
I think alot of people would translate that as?:
I’m hungry all the time.
It wants burgers, chips, coke and ice-cream.
mmmm…each bite tastes great.
hmm, still hungry, one more donut will do.[/quote]
Maybe, but it makes sense to me. My guess is the hardest part is getting out of “junk food” mode. After that, I’d imagine things should be pretty easy. I know a lot of peole (in the US) over eat, I use to. I’d eat like 5 cheese burgers in a sitting (double stacks to be exact), always supersize my fries, etc. I would often eat until I was uncomfortably full. Now I eat until I’m not hungry anymore.
Even though I’m in pretty good shape now, twice upon a time (once here and once in the US) I got to over 100kgs. The muscle under the fat probably helped in weight loss, but all I did is change my diet and exercise a lot (I’m a little hardcore though, I was strict on what I ate, and worke out hard.) I’m confident that the same would work for anyone. The hardest part of that is being consistant and keeping it up (even when there’s no change on the scale and you don’t want to.)
I understand that some people may be “genetically” challenged or whatever (I can remember a Men’s Health article with this little fat dude that ran marthons and stuff), but I’m sure cases like that are pretty few and far between. I can’t imagine meeting a person that (truthfully) told me they were hardcore about diet (not dieting) and excercise for 1 year straight and didn’t lose weight.
[quote=“miltownkid”][quote=“Hongda”][quote=“miltownkid”][ul]
[li]Eat when you’re hungry.[/li]
[li]Eat exactly what your body wants.[/li]
[li]Eat each bite consciously[/li]
[li]Stop when your body has had enough.[/li][/ul]
[/quote]
I think alot of people would translate that as?:
I’m hungry all the time.
It wants burgers, chips, coke and ice-cream.
mmmm…each bite tastes great.
hmm, still hungry, one more donut will do.[/quote]
Maybe, but it makes sense to me. [/quote]
Makes sense to me also but I think most overweight people aren’t that in tune with their body.
Interesting what you say about eating in the States. Everyone in my family are very overweight except me. I can also get that way easily but living over here I think helps one eat healthier. It’s just still not so convenient or affordable to eat alot of crap.
N.J. student gives dorm room diet advice
TRENTON, N.J. - Daphne Oz didn’t just lose weight her first year of college, she wrote a book about it. The Princeton University student’s book, "The Dorm Room Diet:
Published by Newmarket Press, the 240-page paperback tells how the student from Cliffside Park shed 10 pounds her first year at Princeton, instead of gaining the classic “freshman 15.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060824/ap_on_he_me/dorm_room_diet
You know how anyone who has ever been on a diet, or has used the treadmill, excercise bike, stairmaster, etc., at the gym, is always aware of how many calories he/she just burned? Well, the general principle is correct, but you can forget about the exact calculations.
Good article from today’s NYT:
[quote]THE Spinning class at our local gym was winding down. People were wiping off their bikes, gathering their towels and water bottles, and walking out the door when a woman shouted to the instructor, “How many calories did we burn?”
“About 900,” the instructor replied.
My husband and I rolled our eyes. We looked around the room. Most people had hardly broken a sweat. I did a quick calculation in my head.
We were cycling for 45 minutes. Suppose someone was running and that the rule of thumb, 100 calories a mile, was correct.
To burn 900 calories, we would have had to work as hard as someone who ran a five-minute mile for the entire distance of nine miles.
Exercise physiologists say there is little in the world of exercise as wildly exaggerated as people’s estimates of the number of calories they burn.
Despite the displays on machines at gyms, with their precise-looking calorie counts, and despite the official-looking published charts of exercise and calories, it can be all but impossible to accurately estimate of the number of calories you burn. . .
One reason for the calorie-count skepticism is that two individuals of the same age, gender, height, weight and even the same level of fitness can burn a different amount of calories at the same level of exertion. . .
Part of that is genetic and part is familiarity with the exercise. The more familiar you are with an exercise, the fewer calories you use at the same level of effort, he found in a research study. Subjects rode stationary bicycles six days a week for 12 weeks. They ended up burning 10 percent fewer calories at a given level of effort after their training. The reason, he said, is that people perform an exercise more efficiently as they become more accustomed to it.
There also is a seldom mentioned complication in calculating calories burned during exercise: you should subtract off the number of calories you would be using if you did nothing. Almost no one does that, Dr. Bouchard said. But for moderate exercise, the type most people do, subtracting the resting metabolic rate can eliminate as much as 30 percent of the calories you think you used, he added. . .
As for the calorie counts on machines like stationary bicycles and elliptical cross trainers and stair climbers, all bets are off, researchers said.
A major problem is that the machines get out of calibration. “They drift in speed and grade,” Dr. Haskell said. “If you go from one machine to another, it is obvious that at the same setting you are working much harder on one and much less on the next.”
Another is that the companies use their own formulas to calculate what an average person of a given size will burn at a given level of intensity. And those formulas may vary by company as well as by machine. . . [/quote]
Great thread everyone 
Im a fat bastard, and have been for about 8 years now. In 1999 my Thyroid started packing it in (Hashimoto syndrome) and I packed on weight very fast, despite working as a courier depot loader at the time (8 hour shifts of constant exertion).
My current partner advised me to get my thyroid checked out, and now I’m on daily medication to keep me at ‘safe’ levels.
Problem is, I’m 6 foot tall and weigh 120 kg’s. I feel like Shrek when I stand in a crowd surrounded by the tiny little Taiwanese folks 
So after I saw some pics of myself from my gf’s farewell party in early November - I made a commitment to myself.
Also, having a dog is a HUGE motivator to get out and about every day. This has been a big help.
So every day I walk for 30-45 minutes minimum. Sometimes I do that twice a day. Alternatively I hire a bike and do a ride on the local bike trails. It takes about 50 mins to get from here to the broken bridge outside town and then come back.
The bike riding really raises a sweat!
I know my workout ‘regime’ is pretty pissweak but I’m a big guy with a dodgey thyroid so I want to eas into it.
Eventually I want to work up to jogging instead of walking…
For rainy days I bought a “Dance Dance Revolution” video game for my playstation. It has a workout mode which is good.
Now - the problem is diet. When I first got her I lived on those awful instant noodles (with the mystery meat packet inside). I thought ‘Hey - this is low fat, right?’
I also eat white rice ever day - at least twice. Not a big fan of noodles.
Don’t have a fridge either which means it’s hard to prepare my own food. Damn, I miss my chef kitchen back home… 
I tried the Atkins diet a few years ago. I lost weight but I felt really awful, and gained it all back super fast.
Walking the dog is one of my daily pleasures, I look forward to it. So the exercise part is ok for now.
So to any former blobs - can you give me some advice? Cheers.
Instead of calories, I think it’s better to think about energy. Calories are a scientific measure of energy released through combustion (the defnitition is something like “combustion necessary to raise one measure of water one degree” or something like that). The problem is that our bodies don’t work on combustion/fire – they work on biochemical breakdown of food.
So calories are great when measuring heating/cooling, but innaccurate when measuring weight gain/loss.
Your body does not treat 1000 calories of steak the same as it treats 1000 calories of cake. Our biochemical absorbtion of food means that things like carbs (breads, sugar, rice) are absorbed much more readily than meat or vegetables. Our sense of being full has more to do with how much food is in our stomachs and what our relative blood sugar level is than nutrional requirements (in this day and age the 2000 calories daily minimum is achievable in one meal at McDonalds). A tummy full of vegetables feels as full as a tummy full of french fries. Constant swings in blood sugar level due to soda/sugar/sweets also make you feel hungry all the time.
So think energy. Sugars have much more energy than things like meats because your body is more efficient at extracting the energy from sugars than anything else. Low-fat is great for your heart, but pretty useless for losing weight since most low-fat foods are really carby in nature.
If energy out is (activity) is not greater than energy in (eating), then you gain weight.
[quote=“hippo”]
If energy out is (activity) is not greater than energy in (eating), then you gain weight.[/quote]
It’s amazing how such a simple principle can be so easily ignored or misunderstood, and how the dieting/fitness industry can reap billions of dollars from this.
And isn’t it so that when you exercise your body’s metabolism gets a kick and you start burning energy faster … using your food more efficient …
I’ve lost 10 lbs/4.5 kilos in the last four weeks. I weigh myself once a week on Saturday morning. Whuhoo!
I’ve used FitDay to track my calories and activities. I’ve cut out all sweets (cakes, doughnuts, etc.), and replaced them with fruit as snacks between meals. I drink a couple of pints of beer every Saturday evening. I ride my bike (hard) 6 days a week.
I’ve never felt better.
Fall in love. Become neurotic and suffer from hypertension and lose your appetite. The pounds will melt away.
I watched a movie last night that featured an overweight Jim Belushi.
I comforted myself that at least I look better than he does .
Middle age is a bitch. I can’t image what old age is like. Sandman?
[quote=“Tomas”]I watched a movie last night that featured an overweight Jim Belushi.
I comforted myself that at least I look better than he does .
Middle age is a bitch. I can’t image what old age is like. Sandman?[/quote]
I have to say I admire people that don’t do anything to their bodies in middle and old age (like Bridget Bardot). She could have had many facelifts like so many entertainers(Kenny Rogers etc.), but she choose to age the natural way. Kudos to her for that. I think by the time people get married and move into their 40, 50s and 60s etc, they can let themselves go a bit.