Posts by cardamon-tea

Wow, it's neat to find someone like me. I'm 5 feet tall, 127 pounds, 18% body fat and I have finally stopped fretting over being so heavy. Like you, I got down to 115 for about a year, but even though it was a "healthy" weight for my height, I looked too gaunt and my fat % dropped to 13.5%. I felt fine, but my face looks a bit better with the extra weight and now I'm getting older, I need it.

My measurements are pretty normal too, I think. 35-29-36.

But yeah, I agree, that BMI thing can be sort of tough, even for people who are thinner than normal. I've got skinny friends who look fine even though they're technically underweight. In the end, BMI is a quick check tool, that's all.

To start with, have you seen your own doctor? There are a lot of things that will cause a person to faint. Some are serious, some are trivial. Besides hunger, we have:

Low blood pressure

Low blood sugar

An ear infection

Stress

Being tired

Pregnancy

Nutritional imbalance

Heart problem

.........the list goes on. You should be more worried about yourself than the kids, harsh as that might sound. Go see your doctor and give him the details of this episode, how you felt right beforehand, whether you were conscious while you were falling or had other symptoms at the same time. A roaring in the ears, seeing spots of light, cold feeling in the extremities....

Really, don't let someone just tell you it was a cut on your finger if you know that's not it. Get it checked out. Most likely there is some mundane explanation, but wouldn't you feel better not being scared like this, hon?

Take care

We live on a military base and I had my body fat tested by the military's methods at one of my check ups. They only use body circumference and I came out 39% body fat!!! I am 5 foot 1, 120 pounds. Neck 12 inches, waist 28, abdomen also 28, wrist 5.5.

39% body fat. Wow. Crazy funny, don't you think?

I don't think it's your place to say anything. She's an adult, after all, and she paid for her membership like everyone else. Last year the director at the gym I go to approached me with the same concerns and I was beyond ticked about it. I was a bit thin and had been spending a lot of time working out, but it was because of stress at home. The gym had always been where I would go to be alone and exercise and think, and her approaching me embarrassed and insulted me. I felt singled out and picked on, but I'm sort of shy, so I didn't say anything about it. Nothing she said made me behave any differently, of course, but if I were a bolder person, I would have filed a complaint. I can't imagine a scenario where anyone would be grateful for a stranger to pry into their lives like that. Now we can't work out the way we like? Whose business is it?

Leave this girl alone. She's not hurting herself by working out so much. It's probably just a phase she's going through. She'll work out her own issues in her own time.

4. Make sure to put on sunscreen first thing in the morning so you are ready to head outside right away.

I thought about this and realized within 7 hours of waking up, I'm almost done for the day!

8 am, breakfast, 800 calories

12 noon, lunch, 400 calories

3 pm, tea time 300 calories

7 pm supper 100-200 calories

This looks a little weird, but it's what works for me after years of trying different things. I wake up hungry as a zombie needing fresh brains, and I feel like I eat constantly until 3 pm. But I don't get snacky at nighttime, which I've read is a real problem for a lot of people. I wake up snacky.

I don't buy the 'starvation mode' theory myself. From what I hear, it sounds like if you go a week without losing weight, instead of owning up and admitting you cheated or brushing it off as a bad week, you should become overly defensive about your perfection and insist that some strange force is at work within you to create fat from thin air.

Your body is sort of like a bank account. You have excess stores of fat and seek to rid yourself of them. So, dieting is like taking a cut in pay. You put less in but for a while, you still spend the same, so of course you notice an initial and substantial drop in the beginning. But your body, being a living thing, adapts to a lower income and becomes more frugal with it. This isn't a bad thing, nor is it very drastic, really. Heavier people have higher metabolisms and losing weight will slow it down somewhat. When I was losing weight, I never heard of starvation mode or plateaus and I went through a few periods, each lasting a couple of months, where my weight stayed the same and it never bothered me. I thought that was how you were supposed to do it. Lose some weight, give your body time to get used to being lighter and then lose some more.

When people are truly starved, they get thin. Period. And the body does not begin to use lean tissue for fuel until fat stores have been used up first. That is what fat stores are for. And before I get slammed for saying this, I do know that lean tissue loss occurs even in the early stages of weight loss, but I don't see where that is a matter of concern. A heavier person has more lean muscle mass than a thinner person, they have to just to be able to carry their excess weight around. As they lose weight, they will naturally lose the lean tissue that supports the excess fat. Their livers get smaller, as do their hearts, and other muscles and organs. You simply don't need a huge heart at 120 pounds.

A slower metabolism is a desirable thing. The whole idea in losing weight is to bring your body back to a more natural state, where all functions are in balance. I don't see where you can have a very thin body and a very high metabolism.

Unless you're a teenage boy, that is, and even they grow out of it.

I bought some celeriac at Whole Foods Market when I did my shopping a few days ago. I just boiled it and ate it like that and I thought it was lovely. Sort of like turnip texture with a mixed but subtle celery/potato flavor.

I also purchased a rutabaga, and some kohlrabi, but I haven't cooked them up yet. Golden beets are another unusual thing I've tried and come to love, so they're regulars on the grocery list now, and celeriac will be too.

yes, I SO get that. And no, I'm not complaining or freaking out either. I get a headache, a stomach that feels like it's full of vinegar and steel wool and I'm grumpy. The only thing that's different from yours is I will have much less appetite the next day. It's not revulsion or nausea, I'll simply not be interested in eating anything. That part's kind of nice, since normally I'm hungry all the time.

Okay, this is a perfect place for me to get this off my chest. I feel really petty for having this be my pet peeve, but here goes:

I hate the very overweight women who come in, always in pairs, with brand new suits and shoes and work out together for like, 10 minutes before complaining, very loudly, about what a waste of time this all is. Let me state for the record, I have no trouble with overweight people working out, some of them, God bless them, look so worried I always wish it were okay to tell them the rest of us aren't there to compete, do your thing, baby, you're fine, keep exercising........no, those aren't the ones that bother me. It's the very loud, overly done up women who spend their whole time at the gym talking very loudly to each other making jokes about how hard it is, what special diet they're going on, and then they'll give up and laugh about how they're going to go get ice cream instead because who wants to live like this?

It's very disrespectful for them to be so loud about us "fitness nuts." Right now, there hasn't been any of them around for a few weeks, they mostly show up weekend mornings, and summers and January/February.

Come to think of it, they're kind of a pet peeve of mine and kind of free entertainment. Most everyone else at our gym is quiet, polite, friendly and competent. It might make a difference that I live on a military base, I don't know, they might be a tad more strict with their rules.

When I was a young adult, I spent a summer in Scotland with some relatives there and toward the end of my stay, we were watching TV and the man talking on it sounded like he was chewing ice or something and I listened harder and realized he was American! Heck, it took me a few seconds to realize he was even speaking English. The whole time I was there, I never heard my own voice any differently and I didn't pick up a Scottish accent, but for a couple days after I got back home, when people talked, it sounded harsh and choppy and the words sounded like they were being pronounced at the front of the mouth rather than the back.

This was about 20 years ago, and I have never forgotten how shocked I was to hear how I probably sounded to my relatives. So that's how an American accent sounded to me after a few months of not hearing it. Choppy, harsh, clumsy.

Not intended as an insult to us Americans, after all, I am one, too.

It was great to read this post because I tried that detoxing plan where you drink lemonade and salt water. I lasted 4 days, and told my husband I didn't understand what this was supposed to do exactly, it felt like nothing more than starvation and laxative abuse. He agreed.

I came to the conclusion that I am not toxic. Funny thing is, I'm not really clear on what "toxic" means anyway. Wouldn't it mean I was poisonous to someone else? Isn't the natural process of digestion and elimination proof that you can function fine and clean your own guts?

I will take my boring well balanced whole foods diet and fresh air and exercise over hunger headaches and hour-long bathroom visits any day, thank you. 

I do most of this stuff too, small dishes only for me, weighing everything in grams, cutting up food, eating in a certain order, eating every 2 hours because I'm afraid of getting overly hungry.  It's never bothered me, I have always just accepted my new weirdness as a side effect of the behavioral changes that come with dieting. It's so good to read these posts and see all this.

One weird thing I do is go to the grocery store and "visit" all the food. Really, I'll just walk up and down the aisles and study everything, but I won't buy anything. My grocery lists are extremely precise, my food budget is very strict, I only allow myself to buy food on Fridays or Sundays - if I run out of something, I simply live without it until then, and I constantly clean and rearrange my refrigerator and pantry. I was happy to see other people do the "condiment tasting" thing too, like eating a teaspoon of jelly. I'll even do that with ketchup or salad dressing, it's the one habit that bothers me, because I hate to put things in my mouth if I haven't written them down in my plan for the day. I hate when I stray from my list.

I wondered that too, so I've continued to eat what I ate while dieting. On 1500-1700 calories a day, it took 18 or so months to go from 185 to where I am now at 115. I've just stopped here, and this is enough food to keep me from being miserable, so I've accepted that I'm done here. For a while I tried to get down to 105, where I was as a teenager, but further caloric cuts to anything below 1500 calories a day and I begin acting like I have an eating disorder.

Maybe your question meant how little would you weigh if you ate 1200 calories a day forever? I don't know, but I have read about people who do that Caloric Restriction with Optimum Nutrition and it seems the men get pretty skinny, but most of the women I saw, not all, but a majority, looked pretty normal and they swore up and down they only ate 1000 calories a day. Myself, I'm a little skeptical about that, but 1000 calories is pretty low, and if you're stuck at 120 pounds doing that, maybe there is some validity to the "set point" theory.

Me? I'd rather eat a little more and just be happy here at 115. I've often wondered where I would bottom out at 1200, but it makes me so miserable to do it, I can't stick with it.

Some nights ago, I saw the show called "Intervention" and there was an anorexic woman who was around 5 foot 7 and she ate 800 calories or less a day and exercised for 3 hours a day and she weighed about 93 pounds, I think. Frankly, I'm surprised she weighed that much, I would think you'd wither away and die after a certain point, the poor thing. So I suppose each person's body will do what it has to to try to maintain life. Metabolism gets a bad rap from people having a hard time losing weight, but in truth, it's a wonderful thing.

I've been reading a lot about nutrition/dieting/starvation and a lot of what I've read about binging says that the main cause for it is allowing hunger to become too great.

When I reached my goal weight, for a short time, I had a hard time with bingeing at night and although it was kind of scary for me to up my caloric intake and eat more frequently, I have found that I am more in control at night (which, from everyone I've heard from, is when bingeing is the worst).

I see you also have decided to cut down on the exercise too. I have done the same thing and find it helps too. It's not easy, because I love, love, love to work out, but after 60 minutes, I find my hunger is out of control. Taking long walks doesn't seem to have the same effect, only hard exercise.

Taping up the boxes probably won't help. You knew that, didn't you?