Weight loss support thread -

[Krispy Skream]

I remember. It was way too much. Mulligan?

Today started off with a quarter sleeve of crackers because I got called into work unexpectedly. I can work from there I guess.

 

[Krispy Skream]

So I'm up to 241.2, gods. On the plus side I do keep getting stronger and stronger, so maybe I'm gaining muscle, but I'm definitely not losing fat.

I think I'm going to try the Gambit mentioned on The Dick Show; I'll weigh myself every Friday and if I didn't blose any weight that week, I don't get to drink that weekend.

 

[GarthMarenghisDankplace]

Can I join up for a good round of cyber bowling to kick me into gear. I lost 70lbs between Jan and August on Keto last year then I got sick and kind off fell of the wagon around November. I've managed to gain like 25lbs back. Boo.

 

[Krispy Skream]

239.6. That's lighter than I was. Too early to tell if it's actual progress, but it's not bad news.

Only 59.6 pounds to go :/

 

[January Cyst]

I'm starting another fast, probably 10 days this time.
My last one was 5 and pretty amazing.

 

[Krispy Skream]

You're going to fast for ten days?!

 

[January Cyst]

You're going to fast for ten days?!

Yep, that's actually quite moderate.
Most fasts tend to be between 5 and 14 days.
The last one was 6 months ago and I felt great and lost a lot of weight (mostly water, but that was my goal).

 

[Krispy Skream]

I cannot abide the Ghandi diet, but you have fun with that

 

[Mr. 0]

 

[Done]

 

[Coelacanth]

Been a while since I last posted. I've gone from doing about 10 squats a day to almost 40 while holding weights and the only time I really stopped the workout over december was of course on christmas eve, day and new year's. While my weight hasn't really changed all that much my figure is looking a lot better than it was a couple of months ago. I'm still keeping up with the vegetables and fruit as best I can too (and drinking more water). I hope to be at about 50 squats by the time february ends!

 

[January Cyst]

Ended the fast after 5 days and switched to a high protein, low carb, and low sodium diet.
Lost almost 5 elbees so far, pretty nice (although half of that is just water).

 

[PorcupineTree]

I got sick last fall and unwittingly fell into intermittent fasting. There was almost no exercise done during this period but I still managed to drop about 10 pounds in a short period of time ( at 130 now). It’s a nice change, but even though I’m running again, I can feel myself starting to gain some of it back.

How do you pull off fasting without getting ill? I shake when my blood sugar is low. I get lethargic if I skip meat for a week. (Like, I constantly feel like I’m going to pass out.) Are you taking supplements?

I’m not sure how people function when they decide to just stop eating for a long period of time.

 

[Francis E. Dec Esc.]

 

[January Cyst]

223 elbees as of this morning, 23 to go.

 

[Ann Berlin]

Down four pounds and one inch off the waist since January. Current goal is 11 more pounds but I'm short, sedentary and "skinny"fat so it's going to take a while.
I haven't binge-eaten (binge-ate?) for almost a month and I miss it sometimes. Felt good to drown my problems with sugar.

 

[PorcupineTree]

So the plan is to do pseudo intermittent fasting where I only have two meals a day somewhere between 9am and 4pm.

The cheat is I eat handful of unsweetened, dried orange slices before bed (the portion is about the equivalent of a whole orange, skin and all) because I don’t like sleeping with hunger pains. This is day 2.

I’m also running about 10 miles a week. This is week 3 of that.

I’ll come back and say something if it works out.

 

[It's HK-47]

I put this advice in another thread a short while ago, but I think the user in question gave up on his goals and I'd rather not let the advice go to waste, so I'm just going to harass you all with a wall of text because I like this thread and I love watching people commit to improving themselves.

Keep in mind that if you're even a little ways "down the road" with fitness then you'll probably find nothing useful in here, this advice is more geared towards someone who was exactly like me at the time: Someone who had just spent their entire life staring at their gut and never knowing how to even start, so they never bothered. Someone who's just fat because they've always been fat and they'd figured they'd always be fat. I just got a hair across my ass one day for whatever reason, and decided to knock it off and give it one good, solid attempt.

I was honestly pretty surprised by how easy it was to see serious changes with barely anything more than adjustments to my eating habits and a little walking, at the very start. Everything else just sort of snowballed from there, and it was barely a little more than a year later when I could stare straight down and actually be looking at my toes instead of my stomach for the first time in my life. My only regret is that I didn't start doing this 15+ years ago.

Spoiler

Maybe you're doing well and everything's gone according to plan, and you're finally starting to notice that you're able to squeeze back into those old jeans that you haven't been able to wear for years now, but I think the odds are much more likely that you slipped up, stopped exercising, and at some point probably rationalized eating an entire cake in one sitting, and just decided to say "fuck it" and went back to how you were living before.

If that's the case, or just for anyone coming through who's open to some advice, here's some of the best I've ever gotten:

Stop attributing emotion to your weight loss.
​

If you miss a shower do you roll around and feel bad for yourself and give up all hope that you'll ever get clean so why bother showering anymore? Do you do that if you forget to brush your teeth? How about if you forget to shave in the morning? No? Then why the fuck are you doing it for your exercise and nutritional plans? There's no such thing as a diet that will keep you thin and get you into shape, the only way to do this is through routine exercise and by keeping an eye on what you eat. There's no magic pill, and there's no permanent diet, so quit waiting for it.

The good news is that you don't need to wake up every single morning and go jogging for ten hours, or spend your entire life eating boiled chicken and drinking water. There's an incredible number of options out there for cardio, so much so that you'll never even have to go jogging unless you want to, and some of the best cardio options (Battle ropes, burpees, jumping jacks, etc) can be done indoors, and most of them can be done without anything more than the floor and your own, damned body. All you need to do is go at them as hard as you can. Generally speaking, you want high intensity, not high duration, but that also needs to take into account your current fitness level or any disabilities or injuries you might have. The bottom line is that any activity is better than no activity. Even if it's just walking circles around the neighborhood or doing yoga in your livingroom, find something and start.

The food you eat doesn't matter as much as you'd might expect, either. You don't need to relegate yourself to flavourless paste and boiled meat, you can eat just about anything that you want--within reason--but you need to watch the caloric intake, at least at first. Once you really get the ball rolling you don't even need to count calories anymore to maintain, but at the start of this I'd highly recommend it because it helps you get a much better grasp on just how many calories go into what sorts of foods, and after awhile it'll start to become second nature. If you're just getting started, don't bother digging too deep into "macro nutrients" or you're going to confuse yourself. Focus on proper portioning and eating responsibly first. The macro crap can come later.

Find what sorts of cardio you can stand to do, and just keep up with that every single day. It doesn't even take all that much, just do some jumping jacks and burpees and maybe even sprint from one side of your backyard to the other every single day for a total of maybe 15-20 minutes. Combine that with a caloric deficit of around 1500-1800 per day, and start taking pictures of yourself to chart your progress. I don't care how big you are: You'll shrink, and fast. When I was gigantic (In the range of 280-300) I started off by taking my roommate's dog for a walk every morning and every evening for at least a mile. I lost weight surprisingly quickly, and their fat-ass dog became a much healthier dog on top of that, too.

Make friends with your spice rack, become more familiar with wraps and oatmeal and eggs and tuna recipes because even with just those you can make a pretty damned significant number of dishes. You think a wrap has to be a few slivers of meat and a spinach leaf? Do it up properly and you can make a decent wrap in the range of 250-350 calories per wrap, and they can be anything from tuna salad to Cajun chicken. Think oatmeal has to be this bland, boring mush? Add a tablespoon of peanut butter for protein and flavour, and some cinnamon, or go nuts with alternative recipes that have nothing to do with breakfast. Get some onion, some garlic, an egg and some oatmeal and you can scramble it up and it tastes like goddamned potatoes, and you still won't break 300 calories per bowl.

Just find whatever foods work for you, because there's no "right" answer when it comes to what to eat, all that matters is that you're able to find what foods you enjoy enough to be able to make this a lifelong habit, and the more lean muscle you build, the more you can start to relax your caloric intake because you'll need to be burning even more of them. Once you get there you can heap on 2500-3000+ calories a day without even getting into the "serious" bodybuilding stuff, it's just gonna' be a rough couple of months at the start while you acclimate to the changes and learn how to properly portion things out.

Hell, a couple months into doing this and you'll be shocked by how much food it no longer takes to fill you up. When I first started I could eat an entire pizza in one sitting, or four whole tuna melts and still feel like I had room for more. Barely even two months down the road and a cup of popcorn and a single banana left me feeling too full to bother with much more. I went from what was easily a 5,000+ calorie-per-day lifestyle to ~1,500 per day and for the first half of the first month I was going slightly insane because I always felt hungry, but it does stop. It does get easier, but you need to stick to it.

It's genuinely not as difficult as people make it out to be, it just takes a little willpower and lot of patience. This will not be a fast road, but you can make serious, physical changes to your entire body in under a year if you stick to it, no matter how old you are. I didn't get serious about this sort of thing until I was in my mid-thirties, and then in the span of a few months I was seeing changes so significant that I had to go shopping for new pants because all of mine kept falling off my hips, and I hadn't even bothered to get a gym membership at the time. I had two dumbbells that weighed probably 15lbs each, a 25lb kettlebell, and I did all of my exercising in my home or in the backyard, or during those dog walks, and that was all I needed to get started. That was all I needed to go from 280+ and completely sedentary to being able to wear clothing that wasn't just a repurposed tent.

Either way, how many more times do you want to step out of the shower in the morning, sigh at yourself in the mirror, slap your stomach and go, "Yeah I should lose some weight. Maybe tomorrow." I did it all the way through my teenage years, all the way through my 20s, and then halfway through my 30s before I looked at myself in the mirror and went, "You know you're going to just die fat at this rate, right?"

You don't need to be in shape to get started, but you do need to get started to be in shape.

 

[Ann Berlin]

Ate to the point of pain two days in a row last weekend, but relieved to see I was still down a pound overall from last week. That's five pounds down since January! I'm not sure how much of that was water weight but I'm grateful nonetheless. I hope to keep going at the very least til spring break.

 

[It's HK-47]

Also, one of the best things you can do to help you stick to a new nutrition plan isn't to completely hack out all of the foods you used to enjoy, but find ways to keep taking a hatchet to the calories that go into those meals at any available opportunity. One of my biggest weaknesses used to be tuna melt sandwiches, and when I buckled down to make the change and commit myself to permanently losing excess body fat, having to give those up would have floored me.

I refused to give them up, so instead I sat down and pored over different ideas until I found a way to both reduce the calorie cost for each sandwich, and still keep the portion sizes hefty enough to where it didn't feel like I was eating a Polaroid of a sandwich. The size and portions for each tuna melt changed alarmingly little, but the number of calories in each of the new sandwiches became almost 1/4th of the original.

Original Tuna Melt Recipe

1 Can of tuna, in oil (160 Calories)
~3 Tablespoons of Mayonnaise (300 Calories)
4 Slices of generic white bread (80 Cal. per slice, 240 cal. total)
2 Slices processed American cheese (60 Cal. per slice, 120 cal. total)
Roughly 1 Tsp of butter per side of each sandwich (~400 Calories!)

Calorie Total: ~1,220 or ~610 Calories per sandwich.

New Tuna Melt Recipe

1 Can of tuna, in water (100 Calories)
~1 Tbsp Greek Yogurt (~5 Calories, if even.)
1 Tbsp Vinegar (0 Calories)
A sprinkle of salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper (~5 Calories, if even)
4 Slices of Oatmeal Bread (45 Cal. per slice, 180 cal. total.)
1/2 Slice processed American Cheese per sandwich (60 Calories)
Spritz of cooking spray per side of each sandwich (0 Calories)

Calorie Total: ~350 Calories or ~175 Per sandwich.

Just in this one meal alone I was able to hack out an enormous 850 calories just by adjusting the recipe, finding a way to use and season Greek Yogurt as a stand-in for mayonnaise, and removing butter altogether. I can't say that the recipe doesn't taste profoundly different, because it does, but the point remains that after awhile my tastebuds slowly began to acclimate to the new recipe until I'd reached the point where I actually prefer having it that way, now.

Either way, I was able to keep one of my favorite foods in the roster, and I did this sort of thing to every single thing that I used to eat. If you keep making these small adjustments over and over again to the sorts of foods that you know you already love, you can very easily incorporate them into your new eating habits while taking massive chunks of their original calorie counts out of the equation.