Posts by kimchi858

It's a little funny that you posted this question as I was taking a quilt I made for my husband out of the dryer. Of course, I made this thing years ago, but you don't wash the batting, no. Come to think of it, I didn't pre-wash the top of this thing either. Who told you to wash the top? Won't all the seam edges get ravelled and tangly? Or do you mean before you even cut anything, maybe I'm not reading this question right.

Hope that helps. 

Are you just using regular old fashioned oats or steel cut? Me, I like steel cut, also called "pinhead" oats. They take longer to cook, but they taste much better. I cook them 4 parts water to 1 part oats. Bring the water to a boil, stir in your oats, turn the heat down and let them cook 20 to 30 minutes, stirring occassionally, 3 to 4 times while it's cooking or so. You can make a week's worth all at once and it keeps in the fridge real well, so even though it takes longer to cook at first, you can batch make it when it easiest for you and have it on hand.

As for rolled oats, I think the cooking ratio is 1 part oats to 3 parts water and you wouldn't cook them as long, maybe 5 to 10 minutes. If I eat rolled oats, I just eat them like cold cereal. Oats are steamed during processing, so they can be considered cooked as they are and ready to eat.

Flavorings? Cinnamon and milk, maple syrup, brown sugar, raisins, honey - those are pretty classic flavorings. Fresh or canned no-sugar fruit is good too, but my favorite way to eat oats is with 1/4 to 1/2 cup canned pumpkin and a sprinkle of pumpkin pie spice. You could sweeten that if you like, I don't mind eating it just plain. Sometimes I'll even thin it out like a soup almost and drink it salted, like congee.

Hope this helps.

I like posts for short people too!

how old am I?  42 years old

height - 5 foot 1 inch

current weight - 115

pant size - it's all over the place. My measurements are 35-28 (thick middle aged waist - ugh) 34

short term goal - get below 110 by the end of this year

long term goal - I want to feel good about myself. I want a tummy tuck and breast lift to correct the damage from having weighed 200+ for 10 years. I want to run a marathon. I want to be healthy and strong. I don't want to keep feeling so shy. I would like to weigh around 100 pounds, but if I can't, I'd like to be happy with everything I have accomplished.

I've been wondering this myself, too. I'm 5'1" and I weigh around 113-116 and I had my body fat tested by both calipers and bioimpedence and it is between 15.1 and 17%, which I'm told might be too low, but I think I look okay and I feel comfortable and am otherwise very healthy. I'm sure when I was a teenager and this weight, my % was higher, because I don't really have "curves" anymore. I've read that women should have a body fat percentage of 18-25%, but that seems sort of high to me. Perhaps it varies with age or genetics. It seems, now that I'm thinking about it, that most of my female relatives were - from what I see in family photos - soft and even plump looking when they were younger and hard and thin looking over 40-50.

No, the calories from fruits and veggies count, why wouldn't they? A calorie is a calorie, no matter where it comes from.

What other foods are you eating? When you say "fruit for snacks instead of actual food", what are you defining as "actual food"?

I hope I don't come off judgmental, I think your question is sweet, actually, and you should be proud of yourself to be so conscious of your food choices and make fruit your snack rather than chips or candy.

You're on the right track, but add in the fruit and veggies, make sure you're counting as much as you can. It's more important to count the fruit, I would think, as fruit has way more calories than veggies. If you ate a bunch of snow peas or celery for snack, I wouldn't think not counting that would be so bad, they're practically calorie free.

Hope this helps.

Back when I was losing my weight, I was secretive about it, but I didn't think of it as being secretive. I thought of it as being self-protecting. It was simply something I needed to figure out on my own. If you tell anyone anything about how you're trying to lose weight, you always (it seems) get bombarded with info you don't believe, advice you don't want to take, it can become confrontational. I actually liked the fact that my husband wasn't too interested it any of it, it made it easier to plan my meals without him drawing attention to my eating habits, asking, "What are you making? Why don't you just eat this?" He never sabotaged me, and I appreciated that, no matter that the reason simply was he was never all that into my dieting.

Some things you need time to handle on your own, figure out and come to your own conclusions. This is a good time to get to know yourself.  So don't think that you're being "secretive" - that sounds negative and defeating. Think of it as a chance to learn about yourself and how to care for yourself and grow. That sounds a bit mushy, I know, but as long as it's a positive thought, think it!

I really feel for you here, I really do. It's so easy to get all weird about food and feel like you can't ever get it right. You're stuck in this pattern of eating the same way every day, right? As the day wears on, do you get more and more nervous thinking about how you're going to lose it at night?

Think about how this usually goes for you. What time is it when you start getting all snack-wanting? What sorts of snacks are you eating? Sweet, cruchy, salty? I used to drive myself crazy with the nighttime eating until I changed my schedule around a bit to accomodate a small something at night. Hell, I used to go to bed so hungry I'd wake up at 3 am and eat practically everything in the fridge until I figured out I just had to push my supper closer to my bedtime. If you're eating at about 5 to 6 pm, and going to bed at 10 or 11, or even later, you're going to get seriously ravenous just because you've gone so long without food. And when you let yourself get that hungry, you go nuts and can't control yourself once you get a little bit of food in your mouth.

My schedule is, I have my meals at 8am, 12 noon, a cup of tea and graham crackers at 3:30 and supper at 7:30. I go to bed pretty early for an adult and this seems to work for me. And if I'm up too long and get hungry, I have little bags of dry cereal I like that I can have one of and not feel guilty about. I'll figure out 75 to 100 calorie portions of cereal and put them into those little snack bags so I have something sweet to munch on at night if I really need it.

Also, I don't know if this makes a difference, but try to avoid foods with high fructose corn syrup. I've been meaning to look up exactly why it's so bad, but I think it screws up your appetite by giving you cravings. And go easy on fruit, too, even though it's good for you, it is pretty much just sugar.

Make sure you're getting a small amount of protein with every meal too, to balance out whatever sugars (fruit or otherwise) that you consume.

If you don't mind me asking, are you very young? And you say you're pretty small and light, so are you managing to stay below 1000 calories a day or are you going over 1200 and that's what is making you crazy? I understand how this can drive you crazy and the best way to chill is to get yourself a routine set up to where you can pretty much trust how your day is going to go and how you're going to feel, hunger wise, at certain times.

I hope some of this helps. Write me back if you get time, let me know how you're doing.

I would like to join this group. I am 5 feet tall, wrist 5 and 3/8 inch, elbow 2 1/4. I currently weigh 122 and am looking to get back down to pre-baby weight of 100-105 by December, hopefully.

Current diet plan? Um, let's see. I don't eat anything processed, cook all meals from scratch except on Saturdays when my daughter and I get a treat at Starbucks, and I usually come in around 1300-1600 calories a day. The diet planner says I should be down to 1200, but I get so hungry that low, so I allow a little extra and hope I can gradually be happy at 1200.

I excercise a lot. I live on a military base, so our gym is only a mile away and it's free, so I think that's really great.

Anything else? Body fat % (they do that on base for free too) is 15.8%.

I have pretty much made my whole weight loss experience an experiment with this. The whole time I was heavy, I'd hear people say things like that they had dieted and wound up gaining 17 pounds on 1000 calories a day, and it never sounded right to me. So I bought both a nutrition and exercise physiology textbook from a college and read them cover to cover. It did come down to pretty simple math, actually. So when I was ready to start getting serious about facing my obesity problem and taking control, I religiously wrote down everything I ate. I had this one category called "Bites" for really tiny amounts of food. Gum, 3 m&m's, a bite of someone else's chicken, a taste of ice cream. All the little things you don't realize. Some days the "bites" category wound up being 400 calories or more. And although I don't recommend it, I spent one entire week eating nothing but unhealthy food like beer and chocolate and french fries, but never going over 1300 calories a day and I still lost 4 pounds that week. Now of course, I care more about nutrition, since eating fewer calories means everything I chose should logically be more nutritionally dense, but I never sweated counting grams of anything. Just 3 meals a day and one snack with tea at 4pm. When I track what I eat on this website, my analysis comes up pretty balanced without my even trying, so I would think if you simply try to eat healthy using your basic common sense, you would do all right.

Three years ago I weighed 265 pounds. Today I weigh 123 pounds and I didn't do anything but track calories and make an effort to exercise 45 minutes every day. I track everything, every day, even if I have a really bad day and wind up eating a bunch of "junk food", which thank God, happens far less now than it used to. Overcoming obesity was, at least for me, far more about changing mentally than simply following a list of what to eat and how to move. It is worth all the effort I've put into it. I'm more patient, less likely to let the opinions of others sway me, able to set goals and reach them, less afraid of everything, the whole world is just a better place to me.

 I hope this helps you somewhat. I had always wondered too about people who said they tried and couldn't lose weight. I don't wish to be too harsh, but I don't think those people are being honest with themselves. Calories in, calories out. Food, exercise. It really did all come down to being math.