Posts by animalgirl78

I think maybe she misunderstood what her doctor says.

The larger you are, the more calories you burn just being alive. So if someone who weighs 265 is eating 1500 calories a day, they are going to lose weight much faster than someone who weighs 165 and is eating 1500 calories a day, because the larger person has a much greater deficit than the smaller person.

I'm like you. I feel like if I've really worked, I HAVE to be sore. Though I know that isn't true, and six months into my new routine, I rarely get very sore anymore.

I have almost never had sore abs, even when I feel like I have worked them to the absolute limit. Is it maybe because the abdominals get used so constantly, and it's hard to work them considerably harder than how they are normally worked?

That's my working theory. Someone may have better information.

Sometimes the toolbar seems to be slow to update. I'd exit out of your browser and reopen it (wasn't sure if that's what you meant by saying you had gone out). It will probably resolve on it's own soon.

Pork ribs. I know that sounds silly, but I always thought that they were mostly bone, but took a realtively long time to eat since you had to work it off the bone with your teeth. I thought since it took longer, I was actually getting satisfied on not that much meat; I thought I was eating much less meat than I would if I were eating, say, steak.

Then I looked around and discovered that there are in fact close to three ounces PER RIB, and that they were around 200 calories apeice! And that's just for the meat--add to that the fact that I normally slow-cooked them in Coke (it's a Georgia thing), and I was topping 1000 calories with what I thought was only a few bites of meat.

I still plan to occassionally make my slow-cooked Coca-Cola ribs, but only for special occasions, and I won't eat more than two, myself.

You deprived yourself of something you wanted for a lwhile, and so it's hard to keep control when you reintroduce it.

Don't completely deny yourself chocolate, just find a way to portion it. I would recommend buying bags of 'fun-size' chocolate bars. When you go to a movie, instead of buying the giant things of chocolate there, put two or three small bars in your purse, and eat those.

Also, find slightly healthier substitutions THAT YOU LIKE. Raisinets, for instance, are still high in calories (so get a small box), but they have nutritional value, as well as fiber. Dark chocolate has fewer calories than milk chocolate. My favorite indulgence is York Peppermint patties, which have lower fat and calories than many other chocolate bars. Same with chips; I find that I like the baked varieties just as much as the regular, so why get regular? Or, when I eat tortilla chips, I try to load eat bite up with a huge dollop of fresh salsa from the deli, so I end up eayting more tomato than anything else.

In the end, you have to find something you feel like you can live with forever. It depends on your personal tastes.

I recommend checking out the 'Eat This, Not That' series of  books. They can be very helpful in identifying healthier choices that don't feel like sacrifices.

GI Jane is correct, as usual.

You can get your balance in a good range with some small tweaks--you need a bit more protein and a bit less fat. You can do this by choosing lighter cuts of meat and replace some of the meat in your diet with beans.

1 slice Ezekial bread with light laughing cow cheese and 170 g blueberries. Tasty, keeps me full until lunch and it's only 215 calories.

I do a lot of body pump, some pretty intense step aerobics, the elliptical, and weights. There aren't any HIIT classes that I know of, though my Y has something called High Energy Athletic Training--not sure if it's the same thing.

I should probably get out a tape measure, especially since my clothes do seem to be looser. I know I shouldn't worry too much about quantifying, but I love numbers and charts!

I totally agree with you jodifer! I just ended up creating a spreadsheet on my computer so I can track my own calorie deficits.

The best things you can do for yourself besides exercising and eating a good diet are getting good and regular sleep, reading to keep your mind agile and active, and spending as much time as possible doing things you enjoy.

Have you tried 'natural' peanut butter? It's healthier, and not at all sweet; I prefer it.

I don't avoid it any more than sugar. I am not sure why there's an impression that cane sugar is somehow better or more natural than HFCS or corn-derived sugar. It takes a lot of refining to get white powdered sugar out of sugar cane (go look at a sugar cane plant some time--there's no white powder in it). Nutritionally, sugar and HFCS are about the same:http://www.mayoclinic.com/print/high-fructose -corn-syrup/AN01588/METHOD=print

We use HFCS in the U.S. instead of sugar because of our ridiculously high sugar tariff, which exist because of the turn-of-the-century sugar barons. Basically, a handful of plantation-era sugar heirs controlled all sugar production in the U.S., and they didn't want to have to compete with sugar growers in the Caribbean South and Central America. Because of the tariffs on sugar, sugar is more expensive in the U.S. than it is anywhere else in the world.

Just to be clear; food companies in the U.S. use HFCS for the same reason than food manufacturers everywhere else use suagr: it's cheap. It's not that food companies in the U.S. are especially evil or unregulated.

BMIs are not meant to measure if someone is unattractively overweight, but simply if their size correlates with higher risks of weight-related disease. The fact is that a lot of people with 25-27 BMIs look perfectly fine, but they still might want to take off a bit of weight for health reasons.

I think we often get confused as to why we are losing weight--for cosmetic reasons or for health reasons? I think we are also taught to have a certain level of shame about weight--if we are classed as overweight, than we must look like fat, unattractive slobs, because weight is bad and unattractive.

And it's simply not true. I known many lovely large women (and there are many of them in these pictures).

I think we should drop the body shame, and learn to love our bodies at whatever weight we are. That does not mean we shouldn't try to lose a little weight if our weight puts us at risk for disease; part of loving your body is wanting it to last! But I think we should be motivated by health, and not by shame.

Fact is, if we learn to feel bad about our bodies at heavier weights, we often continue to feel that shame even when we have returned to healthy weights.

Also, on an unrelated note, muscle mass clearly skews the BMI, and muscular people are often classed higher than they actually should be. I think that's why so many of the men are overweight; since they generally have more muscle mass, it is easier for it to get skewed.

It works, but the @ breaks the board's html, so you have to copy and paste the link.

And yes, miserybabe, it definitely shows that people who are classed as just 'overweight' don't look fat at all.

Thank you! Yes, I can definitely taste the fish in those enhanced omega-3 eggs, and I hate it.

People in the U.K. may not notice it, since most chickens in the U.K. are fed fish meal, while in the U.S. we are used to eggs from corn-fed chickens.

Personally, I just prefer my regular old corn-fed eggs, and just east walnuts and cook with olive oil to get my omega threes.