Those who are Facebook friends will know I've changed my diet and am losing a bit of weight at the moment - about 2 kg over the past couple of weeks. (1 kg = 2.2 lb)

What's got me thinking is that presumably, if I stayed on the same pattern of diet and exercise, I wouldn't keep on losing weight at the same rate forever. After all, I had been eating about the same amounts of the same crap for years, and had been maintaining a constant weight, not gaining.

So, presumably, there's a new equilibrium that will be reached between my caloric intake and output. And my weight loss could be expected to be kind of asymptotic toward that new equilibrium weight, rather than just a linear fall.

It means it's not a matter of just going on a diet to reach the new weight and then returning to my old habits, but building and maintaining a whole new lifestyle... which is why I'm happy with a modest rate of loss - I'm still enjoying good food and the odd beer, just less of everything and a lot less of the most energy-dense things.

I started at 98 kg and would kind of like to get back to the neighbourhood of my 'wedding weight' 23 years ago of 83 kg. I've bulked up a fair bit in the chest, arms and shoulders since then though, so that might not be realistic.

But is there any way to get a sense of where the new balance might be, apart from experimentally? I guess if I start levelling out and am still not as thin as I'd like to be it means I need to tweak the diet-and-exercise package a little more...

I have found this site very helpful.

http://www.ivannikolov.com/

The best advice is that have something small, like a protein shake, upon waking to get your metabolism started. Then eat 4 -5 small meals a day. Cut out fast food, chips and soda. Leans meats, lots of veggies. Fried can be ok depending on how it is fried so you can't get fried food you don't trust, whatever that means.

There is a point at which your weight loss will stop, you can't disappear entirely after all. Best advice I can give?

Exercise every day, 30 mins of an elevated heart rate and eat smalls meals throughout the day.

Substitute 'couple of coffees and bowl of muesli-like substance' for 'protein shake' and you've got it. Need to add more exercise to the mix, but the weather has been sauna-like lately. Just need to man-up, I guess...

Learn to pack meals too, I take two meals to work at night normally. Sometimes with a snack of yogurt or a bit of fruit as well. Who makes the food in your house? They need to be complicit in your weight loss. No baking lasagna for example if you can't eat a lot of pasta and cheese after all. Also when they make a good healthy meal have them make more of it, voila you have enough for a meal or two the next day and it is already healthy stuff.

Portion sizes, on burger night just eat one burger not two. If you eat one and are still hungry think about waiting a bit. Either you won't be hungry or you wait long enough and it will count as another meal.

Don't eat within 2 hours of the time you plan on sleeping. It won't really process right.

If beer is your friend, prepare to see your friend less. For guys our age beer is tough to drink without seeing jiggle of a beer gut eventually.

quote:

Originally posted by Bravus:
Substitute 'couple of coffees and bowl of muesli-like substance' for 'protein shake' and you've got it. Need to add more exercise to the mix, but the weather has been sauna-like lately. Just need to man-up, I guess...

Not really meant to be a substitute for breakfast. You don't want you breakfast hitting your system cold. Prime it with a few bites of something 30 mins or so before you eat.

Ah, makes sense... but I'm seldom *awake* 30 min before breakfast!

Yeah, I've done 2 things on the beer front:
1. switched from 2 every 1-2 nights to 1 every 2-3 nights... barely worth drinking it at all, but it still goes down real well after a long hot day at work
2. switched to a no-carb beer, which is only about 360 kJ instead of something like 600 for regular beer

I can make my own salad sandwiches on wholewheat at work for a couple of bucks, which is a good enough deal that it's rarely worth taking anything in, because if I do I have to take my bag on the bike and lug it around.

And yeah, Alex has been doing a lot of the cooking and she's vegan and also losing weight, so it's been very light and very good.

Sounds good, now the challenge is the self discipline to keep with it. I like to watch movies or tv with people in the kind of shape I would like to be in, although that sounds ridiculous I keeps me thinking about staying in shape. Also working in gay clubs I was CONSTANTLY surrounded by guys in fantastic shape. It takes a little of that sometimes to shame you into making changes.

Good for you I've done 15lb in the last month, and am really proud of myself..

Breakfast is either granola with far free yoghurt, or porridge (made with skimmed milk) and raisins / dried cranberries..
I'm loving having home made soups for lunch - filling but healthy.. and then protein, and veggies with less carbs than I would normally have, for dinner.. Add in plenty of water and green tea (and coffee at breakfast), and a few healthy snacks (eg fat free fruit yoghurts, breadsticks and low fat cream cheese..) and a few "treats" and I'm actually quite enjoying it.

This shit is tricky.

There's two things.

Weight loss. And. Body composition.

Weight loss is easy. Do this: Eat less, every day, for the rest of your life.

That is basically the only thing that will work but it works every time.


Body composition. Which is usually called "burning fat". That's a different animal.

You can't just do cardio and restrict calories..this will tell the body it's starving, making it want to hold on to excess body fat in particular.

Except that of course exercising more and eating less will drop weight...but will that be fat weight? Or muscle?

If you're not using your muscles (meaning heavy *weight* training (muscular endurance (doing high numbers of pushups or squats for example) will not tend to retain muscle mass in the same way (see special forces types who are not big but can crank out 100s of pushups)) then your body will certainly get rid of them first (muscle that isn't being used serves no essential physiological purpose...where as fat is needed for survival, particularly if your body feels it's starving (caloric insufficiency)).

This is the classic that we see in the news a bit lately. Doing "more exercise" (which always means 'cardio' (either running or lifting weights so light as to elicit no bodily stress response in doing so...just more cardio\calorie burn) and 'eating less' does not really make folks healthier or even smaller (and even more rarely does it make folks leaner...which is really what everybody wants).


That said you're certainly limited by diet, and by adherence to the diet. Packing meals, managing hunger, allowing for off-program or binge days...all tricky.

Diet controls size and also body composition. Dropping fat from the diet for instance make the body horde fat. So eating low fat and doing more cardio while restricting calories tends to produce a muscle wasting effect.

And the real issue being you've got to do whatever it is forever and ever.

The trick of burning excess adipose tissue in the body is...well...it's tricky.

I think 10 minutes of daily exercise, 1 session a week of heavy weight lifting, and 1 session a week of either cardio or high intensity intervals is all that's required (along with inevitable changes in diet).

Things like eating more vegetables to manage hunger, displacing carbs with protein sources, these tend to produce good effects on body composition, often w.o. a strong need to control for calories.

Largely I think counting calories is not productive. Similarly doing 'more' exercise is fine, but really it's more about what kind you do.

I intended to write about it in the What happened to you today thread, but it goes better here.

Since I stopped work, in July, I've put on something like 8kgs. I've started running a few times since then, but never stuck to it.

I turned 32 a few days back and I decided to take an initiative on my weight/body and health in general. We had already bought a steam-cooker at the beginning of January and our general diet has improved.

So, on Monday, day after my birthday, I started Aikido. And I intend to run on the days between. And quit all soft drinks, except DrPepper which is a treat for me and I rarely buy anyway. Add a basic workout at home. My goal is to lose 2-2,5kgs/month.

Aikido, turns out I like and it's 10m from my front door. Running I knew I like, I have good equipment, but I need to take the car, I can't just get out and run, doesn't work like that in Athens.

quote:

If you're not using your muscles (meaning heavy *weight* training (muscular endurance (doing high numbers of pushups or squats for example) will not tend to retain muscle mass in the same way (see special forces types who are not big but can crank out 100s of pushups)) then your body will certainly get rid of them first (muscle that isn't being used serves no essential physiological purpose...where as fat is needed for survival, particularly if your body feels it's starving (caloric insufficiency)).

This is very well put.

If I had to say just one thing about weight loss (from what I've read and experienced) it would be, eat as much as you want (and to some extent eat whatever you want) as long as you exercise (fast walking for example) as often as possible (ie daily!). The more you exercise the sooner you'll loose weight. Now, if you want to build muscle as well, you'll need to go to certain type/way and amount of exercise.

quote:

Originally posted by yer.andreas:
If I had to say just one thing about weight loss (from what I've read and experienced) it would be, eat as much as you want (and to some extent eat whatever you want) as long as you exercise (fast walking for example) as often as possible (ie daily!). The more you exercise the sooner you'll loose weight. Now, if you want to build muscle as well, you'll need to go to certain type/way and amount of exercise.

Errmm...that only works if you're sure you're expending more calories than you consume.

Think about it, if you eat a chocolate muffin you didn't need, it'll add about 400 calories to your daily intake. To work that off you'll need to run for about 5 km.

weird I stepped on the scales last week and I was about 15 pounds lighter. I mean Ive been pedalling my high resistance prone exercise bike for 25k a day, but this is something else. I think its the fact that I pulled my juice drinking way down. A shot glass of juice with a tall glass of water as a chaser seems to be it. from 300 calories a few times a day down to a quarter of that. Dunno. Could be male menopause..

quote:

Errmm...that only works if you're sure you're expending more calories than you consume.

Of course, but I noticed that runnig every day makes me less hungry.
Or, more precisely : my hunger is much more easily sated.

that is odd, I would think.

But maybe not really my father, an avid runner, eats very small portions. He cannot eat prior to running and he doesn't eat a lot after either.

Despite what anybody says whenever I meet somebody who is in great shape I notice that running is ALWAYS at least a part of their program. You can try and get around it all you want, I am not running right now for example, but in the end if you really want legs of steel and serious fat burning it seems you need to get out there in the sun and pound them out.

Unfortunately my twice-broken leg is seriously not a fan of running - cycling might have to be my substitute.

I'm fortunate in that a lot of cycling as a kid and youth has left me with a lot of muscle in my legs (the thigh muscles are by far the largest proportion of muscle mass in the body), and some fairly serious gym time plus a total of about two years on crutches has done similar for my upper half. And something, possibly naturally high testosterone, has meant I've kept a lot of muscle even when I haven't been working out a lot. So I think I'm in a decent place in terms of body composition - except for the 30% or so body fat. But I do take the point about needing to do muscle building exercise rather than just a heap of light cardio. I'm doing pushups and heavy-weights-low-reps bicep curls, but I really would be better off to join a gym. Unfortunately it's more money than time that's keeping me from it...

This has turned into a bit of a weight loss tips thread, and as much as that's useful (hopefully to lots of people) it's not really what I was asking in the first place.

I was wondering whether there's any way other than trial and error to figure out where the new plateau weight for a particular diet-and-exercise combination. I suspect probably not, as it comes down to a particular persons body, metabolism and so on. It has to be 'suck it and see'.

So, will keep doing my Wednesday Weekly Weigh-ins, which are currently showing a consistent 0.5-1 kg per week loss on a regime that I would be very happy to maintain for life. If that starts to plateau I guess I'll have to have another look.

Some here might enjoy The Hacker's Diet. Sorry, andreas, but it pretty much debunks the 'eat what you want and exercise' philosophy: as FashionPolice noted above, it takes a large amount of exercise to burn off a relatively small amount of energy. Exercise is beneficial for boosting metabolism and the body composition stuff - but unless what you *want* is already a fairly decent diet, exercise alone is unlikely to make weight loss happen. Diet has to play a role.

Here's the diet I'm on (it's called Lifestyle Change)

1) Stop eating when you're full
2) Avoid liquid calories (greendreams will testify to this one)
3) Don't buy food with stupid calories. If it's in your house, you will eat it.
4) Increase daily calorie expenditure by taking stairs, walking, biking, standing up at work, etc.
5) Exercise more

That's it.

I am however considering going to a hypnotist to help keep me from going snack crazy.

Snack binges are what cause me to gain weight.