<p>ish…please don’t tell me I need to start pushups!</p>
<p>entertaining was good…except for the wine!</p>
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<p>I’m trying to act more like a French woman. I’ve stopped shaving my legs and armpits!</p>
<p>OK, on the subject of calories and stuff, I looked up iPod nazi’s formula for how many calories you need to maintain weight.</p>
<p>Step 1: figure out your percentage body fat. I use a Taniita bathroom scale which is supposed to be pretty accurate if you average the readings over severl weeks. There are million calculators on the web.</p>
<p>Step 2: Subtract your body fat from your total weight to get your lean body mass.</p>
<p>Step 3: Use the following formula to estimate your basal metabolic rate, i.e. the number of calories you would need to eat to maintain your weight if you did nothing but lie in bed. </p>
<p>BMR = (9.8 x Lean Body Mass in pounds) + 370</p>
<p>Step 4: Estimate your activity level, on a scale from total couch potato getting zero exercise to professional athlete training twice a day. Then multiply your basal metabolic rate by the appropriate multipllier to get the calories you must consume to maintain your current rate:</p>
<p>1.200 couch potato, zero exercise
1.375
1.550 moderately active, working out 3 to 5 times per week
1.725
1.900 professional athlete training twice a day</p>
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<p>BMR x activity multiplier = calories to maintain weight</p>
<p>To lose one pound per week, you need to eat 3500 calories per week (500 per day) less than your maintenance requirements. According to this formula, I need to eat 2700 to 2800 calories a day to maintain my weight. To continue losing at 1.8 pounds a week rate I’ve seen, I need a deficit of 900 calories a day, meaning I can eat between 1800 and 1900 calories a day. That sounds about right where I’ve been.</p>
<p>We have a dinner for two of a frozen California Pizza Kitchen pizza (thin crust) and a salad from time to time. The pizza is a total of 810 calories, so half a small pizza each is 405 calories. Figure maybe another 500 calories each for my homemade blue cheese dressing and some croutons. Probably a 900 calorie dinner that feels like a real splurge.</p>
<p>I’ve read some nutrition “guru” write that you want to eat a carb dinner (like pizza) once a week when dieting. Apparently, if you completely stop carbing, the body eventually interprets that a sign of impeding starvation and goes into a preservation mode of no fat burning. The once a week carb binge gives the green light that stores of food are plentiful and metabolism can crank up and burn fat. Who knows, but there is apparently research to back up these theories.</p>
<p>Why limit carbs to once a week? I would think that a small amount of carbs once a day would keep things humming along at a steady pace.</p>
<p>I went through the low carb diet entry at Wikipedia and as far as I can tell, it appears that a low carb diet keeps more sugar in the bloodstream instead of storing it as fat. The evolutionary idea is that we ate more protein and less carbs as hunters and started eating more carbs with farming societies. </p>
<p>The science is complicated but it appears to me that the low-carb diet produces a body response similar to that of aerobic exercise beyond 20 minutes in that it burns fat as the energy source for the workout. In exercise, of course, the body needs sufficient oxygen and water to convert fat to energy that the body can use.</p>
<p>There are some health concerns over low-carb diets. I need to go through the article again. It may be that the low-carb diet has moderate or significant health benefits over the high-carb US diet. I personally lean towards more carbs but maybe I should move to fewer carbs. For those using low-carb diets, what is your reasoning?</p>
<p>I think that if you exercise enough, the weight will come off but I’m all for a more efficient process.</p>
<p>idad- I liked your post about counting calories. I had great results eating whatever I wanted but keeping a daily log and not eating after I consumed 2200 calories in a day. I am really good with the exercise part of the weight loss equation not so good on the calorie consumption part. When I was young I easily out worked a poor diet can not do it at my age now.
I get my best results when I do what I call my creature of habit diet- I take all of my favorite foods (except the junk) and make sure I include them in my daily meals. I limit my calorie intake to about the 2200 calorie mark and make sure to exercise. For me eating less than 2200 calories really impacts my workouts. I estimate that I use up between 400-600 calories per workout depending how intense I go. I have to keep a log or else I blow right past my calorie needs. If I eat right, small meals, healthy snacks, I feel great and never get hungry. If I fall off the wagon and grab some junk food it is over.</p>
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<p>I don’t limit carbs. I have a sandwich for lunch many days. I don’t really try to limit any food group. </p>
<p>Having said that, if you are trying to cut calories, you will be limiting carb intake to some degree, simply because that’s where so many of the calories are.</p>
<p>The nutritional guy who recommended pizza once a week was more referring to the need to give a dieter a real spike of carbs from time to time, as a sort of an on-off switch for metabolism. He had it worked out even more intricately, using those high-carb days as an opportunity for the most intense workout of the week, etc.</p>
<p>I’m not very extreme on any of this stuff. I just try to eat less and move more! To whatever extent I can do one or other other or both, I am guaranteed to see some benefit over eating more and moving less!</p>
<p>I do think there’s a tendency these days for a message of “eat no carbs” or “eat no fat”. I’m not sure that’s a positive message. It may create a way of looking at food that is not conducive to long-term weight maintenance.</p>
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<p>The junk food and zero exercise were turning me into the Goodyear blimp. Those have really been the two issues I’ve address with my “eat less, move more” lifestyle change.</p>
<p>I try to be a little conscious of calories in a meal and so forth, but I’m not crazy about it. I’ll have an Italian sub for dinner from time to time, just trying to mix some higher calorie meals with some lower calorie meals during the week. But, I’m like you, I just can’t even entertain the thought of junk food like candy or potato chips. I gotta be “Nancy Reagan” on that stuff. </p>
<p>I’m not sure what I’ll do when I finally stop trying to lose more weight. It would be nice to be able to have the mindset of a junk food splurge as a once a month type thing. I’ll let the scales dictate that. Right now, I’m not even tempted to buy it, which is a good place to be. I haven’t touched a snack of any kind the last two or three days. At night, when I started to go grazing for a snack, I just had a glass of water instead. I just really wasn’t hungry and maybe I’m starting to break the habit of snacking just to snack.</p>
<p>That is my problem I snack just to snack especially from about 8 to 10pm.</p>
When I want a snack, but I’m not truly hungry, I eat fruit and drink a cup of coffee. Sometimes I’m just bored. If I’m hungry I might eat something more substantial if the fruit and coffee doesn’t do the trick.
<p>With moderately conservative estimates, the formula says I need about 2700 calories a day. No wonder those 1200 calorie a day diets sound like torture to me.</p>
<p>We have a lot of low-cal/no-cal stuff in the office so you can always get something to drink and not worry about calories. We have some high-calorie stuff too if you want to indulge (orange, grape, apple juice, hot chocolate, soda).</p>
<p>We also have a kitchen with chips, nuts, chocolate (lots of varieties), licorice, ice cream (sometimes), gum, pretzels (sometimes). You can pack on the pounds with that stuff. Fortunately that kitchen is far from my office.</p>
<p>Rest day for me. Eight straight days of exercise (counting a day of fertilizing) and my body said “no mas”. Just stiff all over. Three hard days of iPod nazi and I had to wave the white flag for a day to recover!</p>
<p>Plus, it was just crazy hot here today.</p>
<p>I didn’t run yesterday - too busy. Slept a lot of hours during the day today. I think that my joints spent a little time recovering. I have some tennis elbow, a bit on the left knee and tiredness in the ankles. Ran a mile late in the evening - felt good and easy. A day of rest once a week can be therapeutic. Too much degradation can bring on colds for me. I think that the body is too busy repairing me to fight off bugs.</p>
<p>Last night I did something I haven’t done in about five years: DH and I went downtown after dinner and got ice cream! Yum. It certainly hit the spot. </p>
<p>Of course, I’m up a pound this morning, which obviously can’t be from last night’s ice cream. I’ll just put it out of my mind, eat and exercise during the week as I usually do, and we’ll see where I am next weekend.</p>
<p>I assume that many are drinking more water during the east coast heat wave and that can do funny things with your weight. I do not weigh myself that often. I just go by which notch in my belt I am using.</p>
<p>^^^I’ve been curious about that…How often do you weigh yourself? Is it just me, or does your body weight vary considerably from one day to the next–or even during various times of the day? I can weight can vary as much as 4-5 lbs. over a period of 24-36 hrs…ANybody know what the ‘experts’ say about how often to weigh?</p>
<p>As a part of my motivation, I have weighed myself daily and recorded the weight in an Excel graph for the last 19 weeks. So, I’ve now got months of watching my daily weight.</p>
<p>First, it’s important to be consistent in when you weigh yourself. I weigh myself first thing in the morning. Get out of bed, empty my bladder, take off my pajamas, stand on the scale. That is almost always my lowest weight of the day (which is motivating!) and it’s the most consistent. Honestly, I have not seen a lot of fluctuating noise from day to day. The largest swing up or down has been one pound and typically the moves are a quarter pound up or down. </p>
<p>I’ve been losing a steady 1.8 pounds per week over that period, but what I have noticed is that it frequently occurs in a signficant drop over a few day period, followed by a plateau for a week or so, followed by another drop. I haven’t seen any correlation between splurging with a meal and these fluctuations or plateaus. I suspect that it’s probably water levels more than anything else. I also suspect that, because I’ve been ramping up a workout program, I’ve been building lean muscle mass as the same time as I’ve been burning fat. Adding lean muscle keeps the scale from going down, even though it is hugely beneficial, especially for long-term fat burning. If you are going to chart weight daily, you’ve got to accept the plateaus and not get discouraged.</p>
<p>As for flucuations during the day, I would say that two to four pounds is typical. Clothes add 1 to 2 pounds. Eating a meal or drinking a glass of water can add a pound or two. Dehydration right after a workout before dinner can put be back near my morning weight. My heaviest weight of the day is usually right after dinner.</p>
<p>I’m a male. It’s probably different for women. But, that’s what I’ve seen charting weight for several months.</p>
<p>I suspect women – at least, pre-menopausal women – have monthly fluctuations that just confuse things terribly. I’m sure that somewhere, some woman has charted her weight for, say, a year and seen how her cycle affects her weight.</p>
<p>idad, your consistency is admirable.</p>
<p>[Edit: That’s monthly cycle, not bicycle!!]</p>