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I am a bit of an experienced dieter. Struggling with weight my entire life has put my body through cycles of gaining and loosing A LOT of weight. the last time I did a long term diet like this I lost 100 pounds, sadly I hope to acomplish this same feat again (AND KEEP IT THE FUCK OFF!)
I also put up this public weight log that I will do my best to keep updated. Its as honest as it is personally embaressing (im ashamed of my current weight) but also I hope it inspires some of you out there who are in a similar boat who feel its impossible to make a real change. Im sure theres a few overweight people on gemini besides myself. Maybe we can start a #weightloss movement on gemini :P
I AM NOT A HEALTH PROFESSIONAL! I AM NOT A DOCTOR. I DO NOT KNOW YOUR HEALTH SITUATION. PLEASE DO NOT TAKE MY ADVICE OVER YOUR DOCTORS. I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR ACTIONS.
Is that enough legal ass-covering? good.
That being said, I HAVE sucessfully lost over 100 pounds in the past with this method under very similar dieting and am still alive and kicking today. My doctors were quite proud of me the last time I did this anyways. So if you arent retarded and know your limits you should be okay.
Loosing weight isn't rocket science. If you gain more calories than you burn, you gain weight. If you burn more calories than you gain, you loose weight. pretty simple stuff all things considered.
The average person burns approximately 2000-2500 calories a day. Depending of course on sex, age, height, excersise, and your bodies natural metabolic rate. Use the equations below to calculate what your particular burn rate is (mine is around 2600). The scientific name for this is Balmic Metabolic Rate for all you nerds out there.
For Men:
66 + (6.23 × weight in pounds) + (12.7 × height in inches) − (6.8 × age in years)
For Women:
655 + (4.35 × weight in pounds) + (4.7 × height in inches) − (4.7 × age in years)
As a dieter you always want your daily calorie intake to be at or preferably below the burn rate. The lower the intake, the faster the weight loss.
Calories consumed - calories burned = caloric intake to be converted to/from body fat
One thing to note is that 'calories consumed' is more accurately described as 'calories absorbed by your metabolism' which is a little different.
A common goal for people starting out dieting with the calorie counting method is to eat 500 calories less than you burn daily. There is approximately 3500 calories in a pound of body fat so 500 calories is about .14 lbs, that means youll lose 1 pound of fat every week. Not a bad way to go if your only slightly overweight and not worried about fast results.
Of course, if you want to loose weight as quickly as possible like I do, 500 calories is rookie numbers. For example, I approximate that I limit myself to about 1000 calories a day intake, meaning a burn of 1500 calories (.4 lbs) daily which lines up since I loose a pound every 2 or 3 days.
NOW! the problem with the above method is that it is far more extreme than the slow and steady 500 calorie burn. Theres a very fine line between hardcore dieting and plain old starvatrion that is best not crossed. If you decide to go the extreme method, make sure to get at least 1500 calories a day if not more. Again, Im no health expert, what works for me in my circumstances may not work for you. Please find your own balance.
The #1 thing to worry about as a serious dieter is nutrition. If you don't understand jack shit about health science, its very easy to fuck over your body through a complete lack of important macro and micro nutrients. If you screw up bad enough, you can legitimately go into a form of shock or develop severe symptoms of dietary malnutrition. Nutrients are not a joke to be taken lightly they make or break your body at the molecular level.
You can live off poptarts and potato chips for a good while, until the scurvy sets in as your teeth start falling out while your organs fail. Many people who attempt the vegan diet hurt themselves because they don't understand health science or know what macronutrients they need to make up for by cutting out certain food groups. Its probably best to take some multi vitamins anyways.
This is why its important to stick with foods that are both low-to-moderate in calorie and high in nutrients, as well as to have a balanced diet of many kinds of foods. fresh fruits, veggies, nuts, beans, and high nutrition leafy greens like kale and spinnach. These things are all very fair in calorie vs nutrition purportions and what my main diet consist of.
On the flip side, its important to stay away from baked goods and empty carbs. potato chips, cookies, wafers, bread, noodles, cerial, pies, pizzas, subs. Yummy snack foods and baked stuffs are the bane of dieters everywhere.
Meats are okay every once in awhile as a treat. Some particular proteins and ammino acids only come from meats, beans+rice can only provide so much protein so its a bad idea to cut meats out full stop.
The problem with meat (besides moral concerns with the modern agreculture industry) is that its EXTREMELY calorically dense. In practice an oz of steak contains the same calories as 10 oz of kale. physcially A bag of salad will fill up your stomach much more than half a steak while being the same calorically. Ever wonder why gorillas and kangaroos are so jacked? Its cause they do nothing but snack on leaves all day making em lean as hell.
Among the different meats 'white meat' like turkey, chicken, pork and fish are regarded as more lean and less carcinogenic than red meats like steak and venison.
Sugars are tricky. You need sugar, but almost everything in the grocery store has WAY too much of it. If you are a big cow milk drinker, take a look at the label and see how many grams of sugar are in a cup. where I live milk has 24g of sugar PER FRIGGIN CUP DUDE. Try to cut out sugar as much as possible. If you eat fruits youll get enough natural sugars from those.
If you are a milk drinker, try out some plant based milks like oat, almond, or hemp milk. I like hemp milk in particular.
Or, try out milk that is biologically closer to human milk like goat, sheep, and alpaca milk. Yes believe it or not, not all milk is equal. Each mammal produces different milk that aligns with their own nutritional and hormonal balances. Some animals are much closer to us in terms of nutritional needs and their baby milks is much closer to human milk. Cows milk is too fatty and usually pumped full of artificial growth hormones which are corrilated with weight gain.
Also milk causes kidney stones. Yeah, try to get off that stuff.
Like sugar, too much salt is in almost everything. Salt can lead to high blood pressure and deposits in your kidneys. Not great things, so make sure to keep an eye on the salt content, particularly in soups, perserved goods, and veggie juice. The less the better (even if more is tastier)
Generally you should stay away from it, especially on a diet. Ethenol is about 7cal/g which among the macronutrients is second only to pure fat's 9cal/g. Unlike fat which your body needs to do stuff, alcohol sadly just poisons you :(
I do like my beer, which is the one guilty pleasure I haven't cut out. I limit it to 2 8oz bottles a day at most though. its only ~5% beer anyways so not a lot to begin with but empty calories none the less.
I guess what im trying to say is that if you have a guilty pleasure you don't need to give it up as long as its budgeted with appropriate moderation limits.
Hunger is a bitch. Here are some of my tips on dealing with the pangs.
This is an old trick I learned from people who suffer from annorexia. In your mind, every time you feel a pang of hunger, think this kind of affirmation:
'this is a good thing! Every time I feel this, I am loosing weight. I am looking better. It is worth the pain. Just a little longer and I will have really earned that meal'
Associating 'hunger pain' with 'good things are happening' is a risky move psychologically speaking but very effective one at stopping the pecking at food. After awhile the minor hunger pains barely register. MAKE SURE YOU DONT GO TOO FAR WITH THIS!!! Hunger is there for a reason, ignoring the small peckish paigns is healthy, literally starving yourself to the point your body starts to digest itself for nutrients is not.
Everything is good in moderation, including moderation. Whats all that pain and effort without a little reward to keep you going? When I say cheat day I mean having some junk food, indulging in some extra calories, getting a sugar rush, drinking a few too many liquor drinks.
Ironically cheat days help boost your metabolic burn rate. During dieting your body will acclimate to the decrease in calories and accordingly adjust by going into fuel efficency conservation mode. Cheating every once in a while helps to discourage this conservation mode.
I dont have a scheduled 'day'. if I know ive done really well with my diet that week then I allow myself a small treat like a piece of pie or a cheesesteak sub and some chips. Since my diet is so intense I could probably get away with cheating more, but that affects the weight loss rate too much.
as that Sun Zoo asian guy said, know yourself. I can't stop myself from finishing a whole bag of chips once I start, so I dont buy them. I have a bad habit of boredom snacking, so I replaced unhealthy snack foods with marginally better ones. Would it be better if I just had the self control to stop at a serving of chips or hold off on snacks until a main meal? Yeah definitely, but im not perfect. The next best thing is to recognize these bad habits in yourself and plan around them.
I don't like excersise. Never have, probably never will. I dont have much to say besides you should try to get a 15-30 minute walk a day in with some uphill work to get the heart and lungs going. Very fortunately, excersise isnt mandatory for weight loss as long as you are doing the calorie counting method. It sure doesn't hurt though.
For whatever reason, I don't get hungry at all untill well into the afternoon. I wake up around 6 AM and don't eat 'breakfast' until at least 12-1pm if not later. This isn't an intentional thing either im not even hungry so its just a wierd quirk with how my hunger is. This means that I effectively have 2 meals a day which again is great for weight loss. Try skipping breakfast and see how long you last until the hunger paings start to act up.
Seeing a number actually go up and down is a big psychological incentive to keep going. I probably go overboard on scaling myself throughout the day, when I first wake up and take a dump, before and after a meal, before I go to bed. I want that number to fall as hard and fast as I can. Have the scale somewhere you traffic alot, like next to the toilet. As a bonus, you can tell how much that taco bell dump *really* took off your waistline :P
Read the fucking labels. The final piece of advice is to actually start glanicing at the nutritional information and doing some quick mental math. Calorie counting requires, well, counting. A lot of food companies try to pull a fast one by having one package be multiple servings.
Hmmm this can of soup is only 120 calories? thats great! Wait, per serving? How many servings? 4?? This is a 400 calorie 8oz can of soup? with 20g of salt??? Guess its 'hearty' as in 'heart attack' LMAO! *puts back*
Hmm this other can of soup is actually only 120 calories with a fraction of the salt content, AND its 50c cheaper! this is probably the better choice.