Author Topic: I Wish I Knew How to LOSE You--The Weight Loss Thread (check first post)  (Read 698669 times)

Offline CellarDweller

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Re: I Wish I Knew How to LOSE You--The Weight Loss Thread (check first post)
« Reply #870 on: March 04, 2013, 06:32:11 am »
I lost another pound this weekend.



I've lost a total of 12 pounds since Ash Wednesday.  Today is the 20th day of Lent, so today marks the half-way point.  If I get on the scale tomorrow and have lost another pound, that means in the past twenty days, I've lost 5 percent of my body weight.  If I can continue like this,  it's possible to lose 10% by Easter Monday.

(not counting Sundays.....if you count Sundays there are actually 47 days in Lent.....so does that mean Jesus took Sundays off His fast? :laugh: )


Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
Will you play my record? One-track mind!

Offline CellarDweller

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Re: I Wish I Knew How to LOSE You--The Weight Loss Thread (check first post)
« Reply #871 on: March 05, 2013, 09:29:01 am »


I lost one more pound, so I've reached the 240s, and as of this morning, I've lost 5% of my body weight.

 ;D


Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
Will you play my record? One-track mind!

Offline Front-Ranger

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Re: I Wish I Knew How to LOSE You--The Weight Loss Thread (check first post)
« Reply #872 on: March 05, 2013, 11:26:15 am »
Go, Chuck, go!
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline serious crayons

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Re: I Wish I Knew How to LOSE You--The Weight Loss Thread (check first post)
« Reply #873 on: March 07, 2013, 12:29:37 pm »
I've been resisting posting on this thread, because once I get started I could go on and on. So I'll try to keep it brief.

The week of Thanksgiving (with the exception of the actual holiday), I started a very low-carb diet. Absolutely no sugar, no wheat (whole or otherwise) or other grains, no potatoes, no fruit except for berries.

At around the same time, I read journalist Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It and found it extremely convincing. It's not a "diet book" in the sense of pitching a specific food plan, with meal suggestions and whatnot. It's a journalistic look (Taubes often writes for the NYT) at the years' of research showing that reducing carbs, which until the 1970s was widely understood to be the best/only way to lose weight, became discredited in favor of the now-prevailing low-fat, calories in/calories out approach, which for various reasons, mostly politics in the medical community, became the mainstream medical position. But in fact, sweets and starches cause bursts of insulin that signal the body to store calories as fat. Stop eating them, your insulin stabilizes, and your body will burn that fat.

He very lays out arguments and presents research linking high-carb and low-fat diets to a lot of medical conditions, including heart disease, cancer, etc. The science gets a little technical, so don't ask me to summarize it all here, but let's just say he has me completely convinced, and at my job I get inundated with diet books and diet press releases and the flaky ones are pretty easy to spot. But Taubes' arguments make logical sense as well. For example, insulin tends to cause fat storage in the stomach -- probably not coincidentally, people with large waistlines relative to hips are more prone to health problems like heart disease and cancer.

I recently read in the newspaper about research in which people who ate a lot of carbs were found to be four times likelier to get Alzheimer's. The finding surprised even the researchers, they said. But it wouldn't surprise Taubes, because Alzheimer's causes are widely linked to cardio problems (I write about Alzheimer's a lot).

So getting back to me: I lost 20 pounds very quickly, at a rate of about two pounds a week. Since then, my weight loss has slowed down to more like a pound a week (I'd like to lose another 12 or so). Fast or slow, I like the direction it's going.

It was tough at the very beginning, but once I adjusted it may be the easiest diet I've ever followed. I literally never have to feel hungry. It's true what they say about carbs -- they create cravings for more carbs, leading to snacking and overeating. Once you stop consuming carbs, you don't really care about them. My sons have cookies and candy around and they don't really tempt me (which they used to). I don't count calories. If I feel like eating, I eat. It has to be something low-carb -- but that includes lots of previously "forbidden" foods like high-fat cheeses, nuts, even butter.

Meal planning is more challenging, especially if you're used to building meals in the Jane Brody way: around pasta, rice, bread, potatoes. But ordering in restaurants is much, much easier: I just pick fish or meat with a salad or a vegetable. It can be as fatty as it wants to be! And it's much easier to tell whether your food contains rice or potatoes than it is to tell, say, how much oil the chef put in your stirfry. And you don't have to worry about how many calories are in it. (Though for a while I did count calories -- i was using the online My Fitness Plan thing -- and I saw that my daily calorie count with a low-carb diet was about the same as the recommended count following MFP's low-cal/low-fat approach. When you cut out carbs, you autmatically drop a big source of calories.)

Most surprising, and encouraging, are the improvements in my mood, energy, mental clarity. Even my lower backaches, which used to plague me constantly, have markedly diminished. These sorts of anecdotes are common among people who adopt low-carb diets, I discovered after doing a fair amount of web research.

Oh, and I haven't been exercising. Not on purpose -- though part of Taubes' argument is that exercise just makes you eat more. My previous main exercise was walking my dog, but I've been lazy because it's winter and I don't like being cold and I don't belong to a gym. The poor dog is getting chubby. But my son has been pressuring me to join Snap Fitness, so I'm probably going to do that, and then if I go a certain number of times each week I can get an insurance discount. And I do think moderate exercise is essential for good health. But not necessarily for weight loss.

I could go on and on. My main point is that I am utterly convinced that low-carb diets, hardly the flaky fad they've been assumed for the past 10 years or so (by myself included!), are seriously the best way to lose weight and be healthy.







Offline Meryl

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Re: I Wish I Knew How to LOSE You--The Weight Loss Thread (check first post)
« Reply #874 on: March 07, 2013, 12:49:02 pm »
Thanks for that, Katherine!  I know that's what I have to do.  Now, doing it's going to be a bit of a bitch... :P
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Offline CellarDweller

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Re: I Wish I Knew How to LOSE You--The Weight Loss Thread (check first post)
« Reply #875 on: March 07, 2013, 12:56:24 pm »


I lost one more pound.


Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
Will you play my record? One-track mind!

Offline serious crayons

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Re: I Wish I Knew How to LOSE You--The Weight Loss Thread (check first post)
« Reply #876 on: March 07, 2013, 01:15:13 pm »
Thanks for that, Katherine!  I know that's what I have to do.  Now, doing it's going to be a bit of a bitch... :P

I strongly encourage reading Taubes' book. It's enlightening, and much more of a page-turner than you'd think. (Easier still, do a search for his stories in the NYT, if you haven't already read them.)

And know that it's a bitch for about a week, then becomes much easier than you'd think. The vigor you feel is a big motivator. Seriously, I all of a sudden felt like I'd gotten younger.


Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Re: I Wish I Knew How to LOSE You--The Weight Loss Thread (check first post)
« Reply #877 on: March 07, 2013, 01:30:13 pm »
Any idea how Taubes' ideas compare to Atkins?
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Offline Front-Ranger

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Re: I Wish I Knew How to LOSE You--The Weight Loss Thread (check first post)
« Reply #878 on: March 07, 2013, 02:26:31 pm »
Thanks for your insightful post, Katharine, and congrats, K and Chuck! I am so thrilled to hear about my friends getting healthy.

I follow much the same diet, K, although I do eat whole grains and fruit. I wonder, what do you eat for breakfast? That seems to me to be the most problematic meal of the day.

Exercising doesn't make me want to eat more. You would think it would make you hungry but for some reason it doesn't have that effect on me. In fact, sometimes after exercising I just feel like skipping dinner altogether. I'm told that exercising releases "feel good" endorphins in your brain similar to those you get when you eat a satisfying meal.
"chewing gum and duct tape"

Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Re: I Wish I Knew How to LOSE You--The Weight Loss Thread (check first post)
« Reply #879 on: March 07, 2013, 03:30:41 pm »
Thanks for your insightful post, Katharine, and congrats, K and Chuck! I am so thrilled to hear about my friends getting healthy.

I follow much the same diet, K, although I do eat whole grains and fruit. I wonder, what do you eat for breakfast? That seems to me to be the most problematic meal of the day.

I was kind of wondering what a typical day's worth of eating on this sort of diet might be like.

Quote
Exercising doesn't make me want to eat more. You would think it would make you hungry but for some reason it doesn't have that effect on me. In fact, sometimes after exercising I just feel like skipping dinner altogether. I'm told that exercising releases "feel good" endorphins in your brain similar to those you get when you eat a satisfying meal.

I have noticed on occasion when I go to the gym after work that I can go in hungry and come out not. Also, I can go in tired and come out not. Go figure.  :-\
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.