Posts by posthumanfetus

1. Hey, I just felt like coming back on here.  I already lost 30 pounds, and am actually now up to -38 pounds.  I don't know.  Old rituals do die hard, I guess.  I'm at 212 when I started at 250.  I probably have about 30 to 40 more pounds to lose, but it's not really all that hard to do.  I find that since I've kept myself pretty active with my two jobs, I don't really overeat all that much, and when I do eat something, it's generally a small amount and it's fresh, you know, enough to be satisfied.  I guess a diet is really just that, a diet, and I need to keep track of what I'm doing.

• Although, my body is weird, and I didn't truly start losing weight easily until I went a week eating 20g of carbs or less.  That was able to make my body deplete its glycogen stores and go straight to fat for the fuel source.  That was when I noticed I was actually losing weight by the golden rule of burning more calories than consumed.  I wouldn't recommend anyone doing this more than once every 3 months though because it's pretty brutal and it's HARD to go a week like that.  But after that week, you can pretty much relax a little bit and try to avoid starches the best you can.

1. But see, my body is weird and the thing that makes me lose weight is eating a lot for a few days and generally being really lax in what I'm taking in.  Then the next time I have to go to both jobs, I'll usually not have time to eat enough, and I'll eat some chicken and broccoli for dinner and oatmeal for breakfast.  Then I'll drop all the weight I gained from eating poorly, plus a pound or two more.  Seems to work every time.  I am down to 212 pounds after all.

Deloughy, I know what you mean about how fat can affect a person's perception of heat.  I used to get really bothered by the heat and come down with big headaches.  Now, I love the heat and I purposely keep the windows in my car rolled up so I can drive in a sauna. 

Adversely, I'm incredibly sensitive to cold now.  In fact, I'm nearly always cold because I don't have such a heavy layer to keep me warm.  It may sound stupid, but fat really does keep a person from getting cold!  So at wal mart, whenever I have to go into the deli freezer, I HAVE to wear a coat otherwise I start shivering the very moment I step in there.  I used to have a grace period of around 10 minutes before cold bothered me, but not anymore.  Now, it goes straight to my bones.  Very uncomfortable, but worth it I suppose. 

So today, my meals were entirely tortilla chips with cheese and chili.  Then when I came home from work I drank beer.  This means I will most likely gain weight tomorrow, which isn't so bad.  This only means I need to go a couple days without really watching what I eat (keep in mind, though, I watch how MUCH I eat), then go back to eating oatmeal for breakfast and chicken and vegetables for my other meals for a couple days and watch the weight fly off without even trying.

Now, keep in mind chicken also includes turkey.  THat also includes ground turkey and turkey sausage.  And vegetables can also mean cabbage and tomato sauce.  See what I'm getting at here?  All it takes is imagination, and "chicken and vegetables" can be some of the most amazing food I've tasted.  For example, get some ground turkey (I prefer this over beef now) and cook it in some olive oil.  Then add a little bit of water and let it start getting hot and steaming up.  Then add cabbage and keep cooking it until the water starts evaporating and you are essentially cooking in oil.  Then add only a really small amount of tomato sauce.  Just enough so that the stuff in the pan is glazed in it.  Keep cooking, then add a little trickle of vinegar and keep cooking it.  Maybe even put a lid over it so the steam cooks it.  Then, a few minutes later it should be done and it should be unbelievable.  It tastes to me like stuffed cabbage, but everything isn't stuffed and it's all out in the open.

And if you cook some turkey sausage in olive oil until browned then add some sliced cabbage (slice it into strips really) and put a lid over it until the cabbage is cooked limp, then put some parmasean cheese over it, it tastes just like spaghetti.  You don't even need sauce, it's delicious without it. 

I'm just talking about stuff I came up with on my own since my diet was basically meat and vegetables.

I'm going to see if I can't find a way to post some pictures of my progress.  I personally don't think I look all that different after 30 pounds, but that's just me I suppose.  Well, apparently I have to post pictures on my personal page so if anyone doesn't believe me, I have pictures so you can see for yourself.  There is kinda some progress, but I guess I'm just really picky because I expected myself to look like a rail.

And like Deloughy said, it helped that I didn't have a full time job because that allowed ample time to go to the gym and prepare all my food.  However, now I have a part time and a full time job.  The lack of time does allow for some good food craving control, so I need to be sure to pack lunches.  And really, as long as I don't eat much sugar and just limit myself to fresh vegetables and home cooked meals, and eating plenty of poultry, the weight seems to fly right off.  I didn't even reach the 30 pound goal until my first day of working for the postal service.  And now I'm actually 3 pounds beyond that, last time I checked.

219.5 pounds from 250 lbs.

Total weight loss - 30.5 pounds

Total Time - 2 months.

Total Time Remaining Until Challenge Over - 7 weeks.

I don't really know what else I can say.  I actually lost more weight this week because I didn't really care about what I ate from Mon - Thursday, then Friday and Saturday I got back on the wagon.  I have a starch and protein in the morning, then typically eat every 3 to 4 hours a green vegetable and protein.  That's pretty much it really.  I take multivitamins and stuff.  Well, good luck.

This Sunday I was 225 lbs.  That's about a 2.5 lb. decrease from last week, which is good, and also I think I only have 5 more pounds to go before I will have completed our friendly challenge.  I wonder if I win anything for being first?  A Carvel chocolate ice cream cake perhaps?  Or maybe one of those giant rice krispies treats cubes?

Starting weight - 250

Last week's weight - 232

This week's weight - 229.

Hey, 9 more pounds and I'm there.

Original weight - 250lbs.

8/31 - 243.5

9/07 - 241.5

9/14 - 241

9/21 - 237

9/28 - 232.5

So, like, yeah.  I'm thinking there is a reason why I'm losing weight so much more slowly now and am "plateauing" at 239 lbs.  I mean, bear in mind I was 266 when I started CalorieCount so... you know... not bad right?

Anyway, I think the reason is that a lot of overweight people have slow metabolisms, and once they lose weight and get to that certain low plateau weight, it takes even longer to lose the weight because the body has already burned off the easy stuff and is moving straight to fat - this is where the metabolism comes in - and this is where I think exercise should become a bigger part.

When you fill out your specifics upon creating an account and it gives you a daily estimate of the amount of calories burned in a given day, keep in mind that is for someone with a normal metabolism.  The rest of us weren't exactly fortunate enough to be born with the proper metabolic rate, so what I do is I take the amount of estimated burned calories in a day and guesstimate how off it is.  Now, it's probably not going to be the same for everyone else, and I'm thinking there is a way to calculate how slow your metabolism really is. 

Maybe... find out your bmi and whatever percent of you is body fat is directly proportionate to how slow your metabolism is.  So let's say you are 30% body fat and the calories burned meter says you burn around 4500 calories in a given day.  Since 70% of you is lean, multiply 4500 by 70% and you get 3150 calories burned for the day.  I think that's why once you reach the plateau, you only seem to lose a pound a week on average.

I never went to medical school, nor am I a licensed professional or anything, but it's just a theory I came up with because I was two pounds heavier around this time last week.

Weigh in time.

Today, 241.5 pounds.  Which is 2 pounds less than last week.  It would have been more of a difference, but Saturdays are typically the day I consume more calories, so I don't really lose that much weight on Sundays.  Wednesday is when I have to consume the most. 

To aperfectblink: Well, I try to go to the gym five times a week at least.  I have a rotating part time schedule, though, so sometimes I can't go because I just need the sleep.  When I do go, I spend about an hour on the eliptical machine doing cardio, where my heart rate stays between 150 and 160 pretty much the whole time.  I started on workout level 3, but now I can do level 4 easily as long as I have enough water.  After that, I go to the resistance machines and do 10 reps on four of the upper body machines, and 10 on the lower body machines.  Then I repeat that twice.  Then if I still have any energy left, I'll catch my breath and pound on some of the leftover full sized punching bags from the martial arts class until I'm done.  Then I pretty much go home, have a meal, shower off, pack my lunch for the day, and go straight to work.

Going to work so soon after my workout helps, because it allows me to burn even more calories at my job since I have heard your body continues to burn calories several hours after the exercise cycle is complete.

I pretty much consume 2150 calories on Saturdays, 2300 on wednesdays, and 1950 any other day.  It just is sometimes difficult to really gauge how many I need to consume because sometimes I work 8 hours, sometimes 3, and sometimes I have a day off.  I really have to eat a lot to reach my daily calorie intake since everything I eat is fresh and therefore low in calories.  I used to like fatty greasy cheesy saucy foods, but after being in a routine such as this for so long, I'm used to the kinds of foods I eat.  Also, at least in my case, weight loss is reflected entirely by my calorie intake.  For instance, the other day I forgot my lunch, so I had to buy something at work.  I ended up eating two taquitos and a big taco.  The next day I weighed myself and I had lost a pound. 

Honestly, I probably eat around five times a day.  I eat when I get up, I eat before I go to the gym.  I eat after I go to the gym.  I then eat on my first break.  Then I eat on my lunch break, which is late at night, so I don't really want to eat anything later than that.  My diet dictates that I must eat pretty much constantly, and this seems to be working well for me, even if it does get rather annoying.

This morning I weighed 245.  If I started at 250, and was 248 last week, it looks like I'm doing okay.  Yesterday when I came back from the gym I was 243.5 so it looks like 245 is my regular weight at the moment and 243 is what I weigh when I go to the gym, come home, and then shower, then dry off.

Yeah, I was averaging around 1300 a day for maybe two days and I was steadily losing weight.  Then on the third day, nothing seemed to change about my weight so it seems like my body believes it is starving.  The counter on the eliptical machine typically says I burn around 850 calories after an hour, leaving me with more like 450 more calories from food.

Honestly, though, I should probably continue to eat healthy, but I also probably need to eat about 1,000 calories more than I am right now.  I set my activity level to "light activity" because I work a part time job that does require a lot of running around and interaction with people, but isn't really physically demanding (except for when it gets busy.  I work at a deli at wal mart).  I thought I would rather underestimate my daily calories burned than overestimate.  So I set it to light activity and the ticker estimates I burn around 3200 calories a day.  I don't ever log in my daily activities because I figure the ticker probably already estimates those factors anyway.  If not, then I probably burn more like 4000 calories in a day.

So maybe all this time, I haven't been losing any weight because I haven't been eating enough.  But I really don't know.  I only really started going to the gym pretty recently, and I dropped my calorie intake only a few days ago.  So I
guess consuming less than 1500 calories a day is going to set me into starvation mode.  I really just want to find a happy medium here.  This is all somewhat complicated.

Haha, I probably should have mentioned I was male, huh?  I pretty much talked about everything else.

This morning, I went to the gym and then when I got out I was still feeling pretty energized so I did some grocery shopping and filled my gas tank.  By the time I ate breakfast and was ready to get into the shower, my weight was two pounds lower than when I weighed myself this morning.  Cool stuff, huh?

Eat hearty, for tonight... we dine... ON SALAD!!!

lolwut

So yea, I'm an odd body type because it seems like I crave food less when I do more strenuous physical activity.  Sometimes I think I should have been a soldier, because as long as I am physically active and doing something the requires my body being sore, I don't even think about or desire to eat. 

So, like, when Christmas is over, we're still going to keep the weight off right?  You're not just saying we want to look good for the holidays, but AFTER the holidays too.  You don't want to send out the wrong impression, that we only want to look good for our relatives.

Oh man, thanksgiving is coming isn't it?  Dude... since I work in a deli, I pretty much stare at sliced turkey all day and wish I could just spin around like the Tazmanian Devil and eat that stuff all up.  But I'm better than that.  I'm a real person and the Tazmanian Devil is a cartoon character.

YEAH.  THIS.  IS.  SPARTA!