Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Divided by five is 500 cal a week. Assuming maintaining a current diet , does that mean I need to set my Apple Watch move ring to 500 to start seeing weight loss?

I think if you want to lose 1 pound a week, which is a healthy weight loss, you cut out 500 calories a day. Or you workout and lose 500 calories. It's not that easy to workout and lose 500 calories a day.

McDonald's french fries, size small are around 400 calories.

Two cans of coke are around 400 calories.

Two candy bars are around 400 calories.

A microwave popcorn is around 300 calories.

Those are easy to cut out for people who eat like that but what women in DCUMlandia are drinking regular coke or eating TWO CANDY BARS a day?

A better idea is to cut out 5 glasses of wine (for those who have a glass with dinner). That's over 500 calories.

Did you know there’s debate of how well the human body can even metabolize alcohol calories? Safe to say cutting wine won’t yield as much benefit as you think and certainly not 1:1 with food calories.

I don't even think there is much debate. Alcohol calories cannot be stored as fat...only used as energy, and not every calorie is uable by the body since it is a toxin. So your 120 pour of wine is more like 60 calories. Your body will use what it can as quickly as it can, and if it can't be used, it will be converted to acetic acid and excreted.

The thing is, your body pretty much stops burning any other energy ingested as it tries to get rid of the alcohol and this only counts for pure alcohol...no mixed cocktails.

Durn. I figured that not drinking during the work week would solve all my weight ills. AND, cutting alcohol has made me feel "free" to add a dessert on those nights but that seems like it might be the exact opposite of what I should be doing! My doctor said I should strive to eliminate calories that are liquid so I just assumed that since I don't drink soda or juice, the only place left to cut would be booze. Harumph.

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For some people, maybe it's about portion control of healthy foods. However, if you at two cups of green beans instead of one cup, I don't think that would cause an increase in calories.

There has to be something else, like eating larger portions of food higher in calories, like higher in saturated fat.

Yes, of course, it’s all calories in/calories out. Of course an extra 50 calories of sautéed green beans is a factor, but so is everything else.

It’s just incredibly stupid to think you’ve found some brilliant life hack in the form of “stop eating 2 snickers bars a day!”

Anyone who has struggled with weight more than a few months already knows that. And they are most likely also fighting their body’s natural inclination toward calorie compensation.

My point was, if your plate starts out with one cup of steamed plain green beans (not sauteed in butter or olive oil), and you overeat the steamed green beans, that's not going to be a lot of extra calories.

Instead of sauteeing the green beans in butter or oil, you can steam them and season them with no salt seasonings.

If you struggle with portion control, have you tried those portion control plates? Or tried weighing and measuring food? I tried that once, and I was completely surprised by how much a 1/4 cup actually is. Or how much 2 tablespoons actually is. It really makes a difference.

That’s it for me. Portion control, and when I did weigh and measure everything out it was a shockingly small amount of food. What wasn’t shocking is that I didn’t stick with that diet for long.

You can overeat green vegetables as much as you want.

These are some food items I eat on a regular basis, which will fill me up before I eat lunch or dinner.

I don't skip breakfast. I have already "fasted" for close to 12 hours. I am hungry when I wake up in the morning. I usually eat Cheerios with 1% or skim milk or almond milk, a handful of blueberries, and a banana. Yes I eat fruit. I also drink a cup of coffee with sugar free syrup and some low fat or no fat cream.

I eat an apple around 10 a.m. This really helps to keep my digestion regular. LoL. I don't drink coffee after 10 a.m. I don't eat fruit after 10 a.m.

Lunch time I will eat a combination of soup, salad, and/or sandwich. Boring, but it's simple. I also have an airfryer. I will sometimes eat a tuna melt and some steam broccoli florets. I've made turkey burgers, grilled chicken, lots of delicious low fat protein.

For dinner, I will usually eat a serving of fish once or twice a week with a side of brown rice and some green veggie or salad. I eat pasta with mushrooms, garlic, lemon, broccoli, and a smidge of butter. I will measure foods like pasta and rice.

I get my fat sources from servings of avocado, nuts, seeds, legumes (I like lentils in salads or soup), hummus. I just make sure I'm not eating too much fat.

I also have a large 64 ounce water bottle. I drink 8 ounces of water first thing in the morning when I wake up. I will drink 64 ounces of water a day. I know it probably sounds like a lot, but I work from home, so it's all do-able.

The other thing is, you can enjoy dark chocolate, tea, or some other treats during the day. Just watch how much. And don't deny yourself anything. If you want dessert, eat it. I try to take 1/4 of a normal serving size, and then put the rest in the freezer. A taste will satisfy me.

Anonymous wrote:When I learned that 1 pound = 3500 calories, I cracked the code to healthier eating and weight loss. It wasn't that difficult to cut 3500 calories from my diet each week, losing 1 pound a week. For me, it was cutting out one restaurant meal a week.

For me it’s overeating to compensate from feeling tired and also bloating from not getting enough rest/sleep. I’m so tired at night from working and parenting and planning. Never being able to relax until 8:30 or 9:00. I exercise every day - it’s that I can’t take enough breaks from laundry, meal planning, helping my kids, plus working s Ft job. I meditate. I eat healthy food most of the time. I wish I could lose this weight

Agree that cutting 500 calories a day is not easy when you are not drinking sugary drinks, eating candy cars, etc. But there is always the option of cutting 250 calories a day and losing 1/2 pound a week. The slower you lose weight, the more likely you are to keep it off.

I havent had McDonalds, Coke or a full-size candy bar in years. Literally years. Microwave popcorn for me is a 100-calorie bag. Cutting 500 calories a day would leave me in starvation mode. I'd love to lose 10 pounds but not at that cost.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Divided by five is 500 cal a week. Assuming maintaining a current diet , does that mean I need to set my Apple Watch move ring to 500 to start seeing weight loss?

I think if you want to lose 1 pound a week, which is a healthy weight loss, you cut out 500 calories a day. Or you workout and lose 500 calories. It's not that easy to workout and lose 500 calories a day.

McDonald's french fries, size small are around 400 calories.

Two cans of coke are around 400 calories.

Two candy bars are around 400 calories.

A microwave popcorn is around 300 calories.

Those are easy to cut out for people who eat like that but what women in DCUMlandia are drinking regular coke or eating TWO CANDY BARS a day?

Maybe new moms are snacking while they prepare their children's lunches, not necessarily on unhealthy foods. The extra 500 calories a day has to come from some caloric intake (food) or a caloric reduction (exercise). It's just not that easy to exercise off 500 calories a day through exercise.

And you would be surprised how many people are actually eating a Snickers candy bar stashed in the freezer. Or they're eating a bag of potato chips they pick up at CVS. You're just not seeing them eating. They'll eat the entire box of Girl Scout cookies. Can't eat just one potato chip or one Girl Scout cookie.

I have an obese BMI and I promise I would never eat any of that. Ever.

Obviously I eat more than I need to eat to maintain a healthy weight. But my God, no, it’s not Coke, Snickers, potato chips. It’s too much of the healthy made-from-scratch food I serve to my family because I’m hungry for it. Because my hormones are triggering calorie compensation.

+1. I do eat microwave popcorn, but not the entire bag by myself!

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Anonymous wrote:Hi 8:01! You're responding to me. I do eat a lot of unprocessed foods, but not all. My typical day is eggs and vegetables for breakfast, unsweetened coffee with almond milk (don't tolerate dairy well) and a piece of fruit. My lunch is salads with proteins and whole grains like quinoa. Another piece of fruit. I count out 25 almonds for a snack. Dinner sometimes includes more processed foods depending on how busy the week is, like a Trader Joe's frozen meal, but I try to stick to Whole Foods as well. I like dark chocolate for treats. I can't eat tiny portions because I get shaky and dizzy when hungry and I don't eat until stuffed but I do eat to be full, I can't be slightly hungry all day like people suggest. But so much of my diet includes plants.

I'll look into your link--I'm halfway there anyway. Thanks!

Sounds like you are well on the right track. Check the processed stuff that is in your diet, some is less awful but the food industry has devised over 50 different monikers for sugar so you have to be careful to catch and purge all the added sugars. Sugar is not just empty calories, it is poison that causes metabolic disorders, heart disease, cancer etc. Purge every bit that you can from your diet.

If you are still struggling to shift weight, there is likely something wrong in the endocrine system and in mid life (30s-50s) that is likely to be either elevated cortisol from stress or sleep deprivation, or estrogen levels as you slide into perimenopause. These are not things that come under the typical annual testing so especially where you aren’t morbidly obese your GP might take no action but you can ask for a referral to an endocrinologist and/or sleep physician to sort the issue.

One thing that many folks who post here don’t grasp is that you don’t have to be fat to be unhealthy, and I’m not talking just cancer or heart disease but metabolic disorder. There are plenty of people with type 2 diabetes who aren’t obese, and there are plenty of obese people who are actually metabolically healthy. A person can be slender and still have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, something that barely existed 50 years ago and is now widespread in kids and adults alike.

Well said, thank you. The processed “food” garbage sold in grocery stores and most restaurants is killing Americans. This is by design.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Divided by five is 500 cal a week. Assuming maintaining a current diet , does that mean I need to set my Apple Watch move ring to 500 to start seeing weight loss?

I think if you want to lose 1 pound a week, which is a healthy weight loss, you cut out 500 calories a day. Or you workout and lose 500 calories. It's not that easy to workout and lose 500 calories a day.

McDonald's french fries, size small are around 400 calories.

Two cans of coke are around 400 calories.

Two candy bars are around 400 calories.

A microwave popcorn is around 300 calories.

FYI, none of that is real food.
It’s all HIGHLY processed garbage.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Divided by five is 500 cal a week. Assuming maintaining a current diet , does that mean I need to set my Apple Watch move ring to 500 to start seeing weight loss?

I think if you want to lose 1 pound a week, which is a healthy weight loss, you cut out 500 calories a day. Or you workout and lose 500 calories. It's not that easy to workout and lose 500 calories a day.

McDonald's french fries, size small are around 400 calories.

Two cans of coke are around 400 calories.

Two candy bars are around 400 calories.

A microwave popcorn is around 300 calories.

Those are easy to cut out for people who eat like that but what women in DCUMlandia are drinking regular coke or eating TWO CANDY BARS a day?

Exactly! Cutting calories is hard because nobody knows the baseline. You have to measure and track everything to even have a vague idea is what you are eating.

Also all bodies are different and hold weight different. I’m in ozempic and know for a fact that I went from 2k calories a day to 1200 (which is hard to even eat that much and I’m losing 1lb a week, but am at a 5,600 weekly calorie deficit.

I’m doing this via a weight loss doctor and got my RMR tested and have a RMR of 1100 and I exercise on top of that so my calorie deficit is very very steep.

Anonymous wrote:Hi 8:01! You're responding to me. I do eat a lot of unprocessed foods, but not all. My typical day is eggs and vegetables for breakfast, unsweetened coffee with almond milk (don't tolerate dairy well) and a piece of fruit. My lunch is salads with proteins and whole grains like quinoa. Another piece of fruit. I count out 25 almonds for a snack. Dinner sometimes includes more processed foods depending on how busy the week is, like a Trader Joe's frozen meal, but I try to stick to Whole Foods as well. I like dark chocolate for treats. I can't eat tiny portions because I get shaky and dizzy when hungry and I don't eat until stuffed but I do eat to be full, I can't be slightly hungry all day like people suggest. But so much of my diet includes plants.

I'll look into your link--I'm halfway there anyway. Thanks!

Sounds like you are well on the right track. Check the processed stuff that is in your diet, some is less awful but the food industry has devised over 50 different monikers for sugar so you have to be careful to catch and purge all the added sugars. Sugar is not just empty calories, it is poison that causes metabolic disorders, heart disease, cancer etc. Purge every bit that you can from your diet.

If you are still struggling to shift weight, there is likely something wrong in the endocrine system and in mid life (30s-50s) that is likely to be either elevated cortisol from stress or sleep deprivation, or estrogen levels as you slide into perimenopause. These are not things that come under the typical annual testing so especially where you aren’t morbidly obese your GP might take no action but you can ask for a referral to an endocrinologist and/or sleep physician to sort the issue.

One thing that many folks who post here don’t grasp is that you don’t have to be fat to be unhealthy, and I’m not talking just cancer or heart disease but metabolic disorder. There are plenty of people with type 2 diabetes who aren’t obese, and there are plenty of obese people who are actually metabolically healthy. A person can be slender and still have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, something that barely existed 50 years ago and is now widespread in kids and adults alike.

That's a big deal. That's like cutting out a whole meal a day, which is why losing 1 lb a week will wreck your metabolism unless you do it in conjunction with exercise and eating the right combination of things. Be careful

Hi 8:01! You're responding to me. I do eat a lot of unprocessed foods, but not all. My typical day is eggs and vegetables for breakfast, unsweetened coffee with almond milk (don't tolerate dairy well) and a piece of fruit. My lunch is salads with proteins and whole grains like quinoa. Another piece of fruit. I count out 25 almonds for a snack. Dinner sometimes includes more processed foods depending on how busy the week is, like a Trader Joe's frozen meal, but I try to stick to Whole Foods as well. I like dark chocolate for treats. I can't eat tiny portions because I get shaky and dizzy when hungry and I don't eat until stuffed but I do eat to be full, I can't be slightly hungry all day like people suggest. But so much of my diet includes plants.

I'll look into your link--I'm halfway there anyway. Thanks!

Oh and just an added incentive - besides losing weight, by purging ultra processed foods from your diet you can recapture your youth and I am not kidding all it this! I thought all the pain and aches at twinges and the stuff happening to my skin was all normal aging and menopause - it was not! Yes HRT has undoubtedly helped in some regard, but I’ve been on that for over a year and it’s only in the last two months of eating properly that I have experienced a resurgence of vitality that has me feeling like I’m in my 30s again not my 50s as I am. I’m super motivated by this to keep eating right, and realize that when all the weight is off (I’m going slow, to give my skin plenty of time to keep up) I am going to feel really, really good again. And I hardly think about food anymore, whereas for a decade it was an obsession. I was addicted, of course. Now I am not. I see advertisements for fast/restaurant/snack food on television now and my stomach feels queasy rather than hungry. It’s so sad how much poison is being marketed as food and how that is making so many millions of people - slender and fat - very sick in many ways.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Divided by five is 500 cal a week. Assuming maintaining a current diet , does that mean I need to set my Apple Watch move ring to 500 to start seeing weight loss?

I think if you want to lose 1 pound a week, which is a healthy weight loss, you cut out 500 calories a day. Or you workout and lose 500 calories. It's not that easy to workout and lose 500 calories a day.

McDonald's french fries, size small are around 400 calories.

Two cans of coke are around 400 calories.

Two candy bars are around 400 calories.

A microwave popcorn is around 300 calories.

Those are easy to cut out for people who eat like that but what women in DCUMlandia are drinking regular coke or eating TWO CANDY BARS a day?

Maybe new moms are snacking while they prepare their children's lunches, not necessarily on unhealthy foods. The extra 500 calories a day has to come from some caloric intake (food) or a caloric reduction (exercise). It's just not that easy to exercise off 500 calories a day through exercise.

And you would be surprised how many people are actually eating a Snickers candy bar stashed in the freezer. Or they're eating a bag of potato chips they pick up at CVS. You're just not seeing them eating. They'll eat the entire box of Girl Scout cookies. Can't eat just one potato chip or one Girl Scout cookie.

I have an obese BMI and I promise I would never eat any of that. Ever.

Obviously I eat more than I need to eat to maintain a healthy weight. But my God, no, it’s not Coke, Snickers, potato chips. It’s too much of the healthy made-from-scratch food I serve to my family because I’m hungry for it. Because my hormones are triggering calorie compensation.

Same! I'm 170 lbs at 5'5 and I never drink soda juice and alcohol is rarely like once a month. Candy bars? Never. Sometimes I have a piece of dark chocolate after dinner. There's no Frappuccino addiction to cut out. I have to measure freaking teaspoons of olive oil on my roasted vegetables to lose weight. It's a cruel joke.

Hey poster, have you ever tried purging ALL ultra processed food from your diet? Nevermind counting calories, just purge all the poisonous food-like substances from your diet for just one month. It is HARD, because we are addicted to these foods in ways we don’t even realize. But if you can reset your brain and gut this way, you might be surprised to learn that you *can* lose weight. You also have to clean up your lifestyle - make sure you are getting 6-8 hours of truly good sleep each night, if you are not you will never win the metabolic battle because cortisol is the enemy in this regard - and it will also damage your health in lots of other ways so the number one priority is to address sleep.

I ate the standard American diet for 40 years and managed to be reasonably fit and normal weight for the first 35, started piling on some weight as my hormones shifted into perimenopause and my lifestyle became toxic stress at a 10+ hour/day desk job and no energy to hit the gym or anything like that. But things really got awful when they yanked most of my ovarian tissue at 40 and I launched into a very hard version of perimenopause which included chronic sleep deprivation from night sweats etc. Then the weight really piled on, and a cholecystectomy at 43 triggered an absorption disorder and a vitamin deficiency that it took several years for doctors to diagnose. More weight piling on the whole time, and me suffering the worst depression of my life as I dealt with serious mental health issues but also my body becoming an alien being that was so unfit, useless and ugly I wanted to die just to be free of it.

A decade later I am on the road to health. I have a long way to go - a lot of weight to lose but it is coming off at the rate of at least a pound a week and some weeks more depending on the activity level I manage in any given week. But it is the diet that is the cornerstone, exercise is for my mental health and cardiac health more than anything. I understand the food is the issue, and I now understand in a very real way how much of the voluminous reading on diet and nutrition and weight loss that I read over the years was just nonsense. The most nonsensical thing anyone ever could say about weight loss is that it is just ‘calories in, calories out.’ That is complete bunk totally disproved by science and yet still the mantra of most of the diet and food industry because it makes everything the moral responsibility of the person trying to lose weight, instead of acknowledging the poison on grocery store shelves and hawked by various fast and slow food companies. And the obvious fact that the diet industry doesn’t want you to lose the weight, because then they lose you as a customer. The diet industry wants people to be FAT in large numbers, and has no vested interest in ending the obesity pandemic. This should be quite obvious but like many things in life, the obvious can be hard to grasp.

If you are eating ANY ultra processed foods, your brain is hacked by poison. Until you purge those foods you will never be able to really get a handle on the healthy signals your body wants to send you, but can’t get past the addiction messages. Having suffered metabolic syndrome and a vitamin deficiency from inside the same body that once had neither, and being on the other side now (still fat, but my body is working properly to purge that fat), I really know that if you clear out the poison and the addiction it creates in your brain, you will actually feel your body telling you what it wants for optimal health and you will begin to CRAVE healthy food. But you have to get the monkey off your back first, and it is hard. Not because of anything to do with morality or character or your will, but because your body is a complex system that can be hacked for good or bad by the substances you put in your gut and no amount of willpower is stronger than the endocrine system that has evolved over millions of years.

I haven’t read Dr. Lustig’s book(s) but have seen him give numerous lectures and I know from very hard won experience that the science he relates is the best we know at this moment in time. Ditch all the other stuff and give him a read or watch him on YouTube. Learn how to hack your brain so it can help you lose weight while eating an abundance and never feeling deprived.

https://robertlustig.com/

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Divided by five is 500 cal a week. Assuming maintaining a current diet , does that mean I need to set my Apple Watch move ring to 500 to start seeing weight loss?

anything that counts calories burned through exercise is highly inaccurate.

Agree with this. The estimates for calorie burn from exercise are all over the place and highly inaccurate. The treadmills at my gym show calorie burn, but one of the trainers told me the other day that the calorie burn is based on a 28-year-old, 180 pound man. That’s not me.

Consider exercise what you do for your health, but when it comes to wait loss, it’s about what you eat and how much. Most people over-estimate how many calories they are burning and under-estimate how much they are eating.

Track calories using My Fitness Pal or another app. For a few weeks, track every bite you put in your mouth to get an accurate handle on how many calories you are actually taking in. What you are eating makes a difference - not just what, but how much. The person who mentioned nibbling while making kids’ lunches is right - it’s the sneaky calories that add up. It doesn’t have to be french fries and candy bars, you can gain wait from healthy food too, if you are eating too much of it.

“Weight” loss not “wait” loss - sorry! : )