Posts by snozzberries

I don't see anything wrong with pleasing other people by eating what they offer.  For some people it's rude to refuse food.  IMO, it's a little extreme to live and die by your own rules and sequester yourself in a self-imposed healthy eating exile.  Food is a part of life and people communicate with and over food.  To me, it's a bigger accomplishment to be able to adjust to normal eating in an intelligent way, than to restrict yourself to certain foods.

At the same time, if you don't like cake anyway, I don't see what the big deal is.  I've been to dozens of parties where I was passed a slice of cake and I picked at it for five minutes before dumping it inconspicuously.  Not because I'm watching what I eat, but because I just don't like cake.

For some reason I hate topics like these where people mindlessly ask people if they should eat something or not.

I count calories for most of my meals and approximate the ones that I don’t count. I try to make healthy choices but I’ve pretty much given up on sticking to a number. As long as I watch what I eat I’m always well below maintenance. Looking at nutritional information is what keeps me making healthy choices and planning out my day nutritionally.

However, I’ve stopped “dieting” in that I don’t stick to numbers. I find that 1200 is nowhere near enough for me given my activity level. It’s not enough to fuel my workouts and keep me full of energy the next day. If I were to go to the gym on 1200 calories, I would be exhausted by the end of the session and then totally lethargic the next day. I basically just eat based on what I’m craving (as long as it’s within reason), if I’m hungry I eat more, and if I know I’m going to be doing certain activities I’ll eat specific things. I try to net at least 1200 every day.

But I will probably always keep track and have a 1200 calorie basic framework where yes, I eat every three hours and yes, I finish that food because it is part of my diet. Why? Why continue to finish the cereal even though you’re not hungry? My reasoning is this—first of all, to maintain my blood sugar and minimize spikes and dips, and to maintain a steady metabolism, I eat five times a day. Even if I don’t want to eat five meals. Even if my stomach isn’t growling. Calorie counting is part of this framework for me, because if you’re eating five times a day but eating indiscriminately, you’re not going to be eating the right things or you’ll be eating too much. The other thing is, the body is especially adaptive, and even though it’s not optimal for you to only eat once or twice a day, or only 900 calories, it can function this way for a very long time. Just because your body tells you or doesn’t tell you something, doesn’t mean it’s the best thing for you.

I usually do half an hour on treadmill and then half an hour on elliptical, three times a week. Since it's a relatively short amount of time on the treadmill I try to get the most out of it (without tiring out too quickly or not pushing myself hard enough).

So I do a 5 minute warm-up at 3mph (I have a really short stride). Then I alternate running for 1 minute to get my heart rate up and then walking for 2 minutes at 3mph to get it back down to at least 130. For the minute runs I start at 5.5mph and bump it up .1mph each time, but stop bumping it up when the minute sprint gets my heart rate to 170 bpm (atm I get there at 6mph). I keep doing that until I'm roughly at the thirty minute mark (give or take a couple of minutes depending on how I feel), and then wind down for 3-5 minutes at 3mph.

For steady state cardio to burn calories I prefer to do elliptical because it's less jarring and easier on my lungs. But generally I can get what I need out of a treadmill in thirty minutes.

The best way that I've found to curb cravings are to indulge once a week. If I have cravings during the week for anything in particular, usually I can put the urge aside for the moment (it helps that I'm usually too lazy to go get the food lol) and then on my splurge day I'll decide what I really want. I find that going for it once per week helps me for a few reasons.

A) If I indulge only once a week it's easier for me to get it in my head that no, I don't actually need that cheeseburger two days in a row. If I eat it once, the craving for it actually goes away. I was eating unhealthy food every day out of habit, and because my body just expected it and was generating ideas about what I wanted next.

B) I don't look at it as me "falling off the wagon" and eating something "bad". There are no bad foods, and anything goes in moderation. If I eat healthy 90% of the time, but indulge for one meal, or even one day, I will still have a net loss if I'm doing everything else right. One indulgence will not make me gain back everything I have already lost. If my splurge day is simply to eat at maintenance level calories, I won't have gained any extra weight.

C) After eating healthier foods for a while, it's actually kind of gross to eat something really greasy. If I eat a lot of sodium, the results are evident in water retention. Doing this once a week helps me see the difference between how I feel eating something healthy and eating something unhealthy. The longer I have been dieting, the more I find that my cravings tend to be satiated more by distinct and delicious flavors than random greasy fast food. This week I have been really craving Japanese style chicken katsu curry.

D) Some say that punctuating your diet with days of maintenance level calories stimulates your metabolism and prevents you from (or breaks through) plateauing

That would mean you have 13 lbs of fat on your body. Which would mean you have a body fat percentage of 9.48% which is apparently a very athletic level. I never understood how the BMI charts account for very muscular builds, but yes at 5'2" 137, your BMI is 25.1 which is barely "overweight".

In the end they're just numbers, and I haven't heard of anything saying there's any risk involved with being overweight due to muscle and not fat (correct me if I'm wrong).  How was the weight of your muscular/skeletal/etc systems determined?

It's true that a lot of what is considered fact in weight loss is really nothing more than a guideline developed by a limited understanding of the body and by testimony. There is a lot about the body that is still being studied and discovered. But if you're trying to do something as potentially unhealthy as changing your physical make-up, it helps to think critically about all of the information that's flying around.

There's a lot of study that concludes that 1200 calories is the minimum intake for the healthy maintenance of the central nervous system and vital organs. A woman who is 5'6" and 190 lbs and another woman who is 5'4" and 123 clearly have different caloric requirements due to large differences is muscular, skeletal, and fat mass. But for all intents and purposes, the "bare minimum" is still going to be roughly similar with regards to the preservation of the central nervous system and vital organs.

Of course, when you're talking about the "bare minimum" it's sketchy at best, because at that point you're discarding the notion of preserving muscle mass and metabolism--in which case the "minimum" for the larger woman is going to be higher.

It's not advisable to maintain a deficit that nets you less than 1200 calories per day. If you're burning 1640 calories at sedentary, it's not recommended that you create a deficit of 500 calories per day. If that means you won't lose weight as fast as you'd like, then there's only two options to lose weight in a healthy manner. Either lose weight at a slower rate, or seek medical monitoring during your weight loss efforts. It's definitely possible that you can net less than 1200 calories daily without suffering from malnutrition, but the only way to determine that is by confirming it through monitoring.

The other option is to decide that everything I've written above is complete baloney, and proceed with your diet. That's your choice, but no one here will advise you to do so.

Edited to add: As a response to the above notion that the 1200 calorie "minimum" does not include exercise. It's worth noting that your central nervous system, for example, functions primarily on glucose aka sugar, which comes only from A) carbohydrates/sugars or B) broken down from muscle matter. Therefore if a person were to eat 1200 calories and then continue to burn 1200 calories through exercise, the supply of carbohydrates available for the CNS would be largely depleted and the body would compensate by breaking down muscle to create glucose. This would, in turn, result in a suppression of your metabolism.

This above point is slightly tangential but it's an example of why a balanced diet is necessary. It's not entirely "calories in vs calories out". While the body can generally compensate for deficiencies in certain nutrients, it's not a good long-term plan.

Another thing is, 15 lbs in 3 weeks could be largely muscle weight. The problem with going on a crash diet and exercising excessively with very little caloric intake (especially if you're doing cardio) is that it's very conducive to the loss of muscle mass which results in a lower metabolic rate. The longer you continue in that direction, the more muscle mass you lose, and it's a downward spiral for your metabolism until it just stalls out.

The "culprit" is that you went about it the entirely wrong way. If I were you, I would start eating a healthy amount for your body weight and activity level, let your metabolism normalize, and then try to lose weight in a way that makes sense.

Trying to lose weight without maintaining a normal metabolism and muscle mass is like trying to save cash by skipping work to save on gas money. You need to go to work because that is the only thing that will net you consistent cash flow, and you need to preserve your metabolism and muscle mass because that's what's going to keep your body functioning and burning fat in the long run. Just like it doesn't make any sense to skip a whole day of work to save a couple of bucks on gas, it doesn't make any sense to screw up your body to lose weight in the short term.