I think the mods merged threads with the new diet thread. I was confused there for a second.
And I still hate burpees. It’s like grunt work to me. It’s beneath me. :))
There’s a funny t-shirt I saw that someone wore to the gym once that said: “BURPEES HATE YOU TOO.”
“think the mods merged threads with the new diet thread. I was confused there for a second.”
What?? The ENTIRE idea behind my thread was that those interested onky in talking about food/diet didn’t have to wade through tons of posts about excercise. I don’t understand why such a thread isn’t a good idea. Sigh.
^^^ Do a search. There are several threads about diet and weight loss. There is a Weight Loss for Dummies and the Weight Watchers, and there are probably others. Besides that, exercise is a key component in weight loss and an important part of a healthy lifestyle, so what’s so bad about reading about exercise?
@maya54, if you go back to the very start of the thread the focus was definitely more on weight loss. I’d be happy to talk more about dieting for weight loss but we’re dependent on posters for content. I love to exercise but I also want to weigh less.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/1160314-weight-loss-for-dummies.html
Here you go. You can revive this thread. No one will tell you about exercising or be too hard core.
I understand why @maya54 might not be comfortable in this thread. Clearly after 4000 pages it has evolved and surely can seem intimidating to someone just starting a journey. Doesn’t have to be, but I can understand how it could be.
@maya54 stay here of course if you want to but also you might check out those other threads listed above to see if the content is more comfortable for you.
And I’ll also say great job for your amazing start on the weight loss journey! If you want to firm up some of that loose skin you can get with weight loss don’t lose sight of exercise too!
A burpee story for you…I was in Atlatis with family and we participated in family bingo or something like that. I was selected as a volunteer and they asked me to do burpees. I did it, walking away with a cool prize! And hopefully other people thought I was cool and fit too!
On other game, DH was voted MVP in our pineapple eating contest by our kids. I was the other member of the team and LVP 
Btw, D found her favorite workout…boxing!
I am definitely not cool doing burpees. In my mind I might look cool but the reality is far different!
@maya54 please feel to post here about dieting and weight loss. I’m willing to read and listen to your journey as well as anyone else. I read the “weight watchers” thread, but don’t post.
My diet for many years now has been paleo for the most part. I do eat whole grains, like say oatmeal, wheat germ, quinoa, seeds, legumes, etc. I do not eat cheese or most processed food like bread, rice, pasta, cakes, cookies, Yogurt and eggs, yes. I do eat often and a lot. But I exercise rigorously.
Today’s HIIT was 10 rounds of 3 deadlifts, jump rope, 1 rope climb, 6 toes-to-bar and 6 burpees. So “only” 60 burpees. :(( #:-S
That’s a lot of weight lost since July! Congrats!
I’m working on maintenance — trying not to put on excess weight during the menopause years — and lifting weights to help off-set muscle loss with aging.
I am not a runner like many others here, but I walk the dog and hike with a club on Sundays. Although I have been lifting weights, it’s a very basic routine and sometimes I only manage 2x a week. I mention that because I don’t want lurkers to be discouraged. Something is better than nothing!
I don’t weigh myself. There is no scale in the house. It wouldn’t be good for my mental health.
No way could I do what @sabaray does—measuring and taking pics (in a swimsuit!). Respect!
I was using MyFitnessPal for a few months to log food and I found it educational & super helpful. It also lowered my background anxiety about eating.
I’m knee deep in a new project at work which has thrown my schedule off.
I do better when I have a routine down, and eat the same rotation of snacks & meals. Less decisions!
My favorite breakfast is baked potatoes cut up with hard boiled eggs & salsa.
There are some foods I avoid and many foods I simply do not bring in the house or I will get bad cravings and will be tempted to eat too much.
I can have a single scoop of ice cream and feel happy. No need for a second or third scoop.
Cookies? No such thing as happy with one! In that example, I’d almost rather have zero cookies because the cravings for more are unpleasant for me.
I am interested in discussing diets especially for those who are finding the “usual rules” don’t always help them. For example when I started this journey I told my doctor that I knew it was important to eat breakfast but the few times i skipped it I was less hungry all day. She encouraged me to see what was right for me. Telling me that “just because something works for 90 percent of people…well someone is in the 10 percent.”
I stopped eating breakfast and that has made a huge difference for me. I am less hungry and more open to better choices at lunch time than I’ve ever been.
I think we become so conditioned to eating “when we should” that we forget what it’s like to be actually hungry. I am an emotional eater - bad day at work ? Fight with a friend? Have a donut. Can’t have them around, ever!
Like Midwest, I used MFP for a long time to count calories. My problem was I was too focused on calories and not enough on nutrition. I’m hoping that my new habits are really here to stay. We get a new habit every few weeks and continue to build on those. I’m happy to share those at the risk of boring everyone to death!
@sabaray I would like to hear about those habits. I found that Weight Watchers basic ideas were very helpful in encouraging nutrition but the almost religious adherence some had to the “rules” led me to give up meetings and even posts on WW boards. I thought it was silly to worry about adding healthy oil everyday when I eat a ton of salmon and other healthy fat. But there were those at my meeting who couldnt get over the strict guidelines. I lost 12 pounds my first month amd when my leader had me read out my meal plans I was told by others that I was “ cheating” by not eating extra oil everyday and not seeking out everyday dairy, something I don’t like and my doctor told me wasn’t necessary for me personally. Oy.
So I use MFP as a modified form of WW. I “encourage” myself to eat healthier by tracking certain healthy veggies as only a few calories (I do this by playing around with “ serving size” and this make it similar to WW zero foods…like a whole cucumber is 27 cals but I put it down as 3).
I am looking to start a new eating plan. I have tried weight watchers in the past, as well as many other diets. I tend to get obsessed with tracking/counting and lose weight initially but rebound and end up heavier in the end. My best success tends to occur when the eating plan requires elimination rather than restriction. For example, I can easily eliminate dairy but I cannot restrict it. This probably sounds crazy to some…
Yesterday I was in the library and came across “Eat to Live” by Joel Fuhrman. The book contains a 6 week plan for weight loss that allows unlimited fruits, beans and non-starchy veggies. 1 serving of starchy veggies or rice and 1oz of nuts/seeds. No dairy. No added sugar. No fat other than a 2oz avocado and a small amt of omega 3 supplements. This is naturally low calorie but doesn’t require calorie counting.
As a vegetarian already, this seems very doable. Has anyone tried this? Anyone want to be my buddy? Should I start a new thread similar to the WW threads but focused on this?
I think a really key takeaway from these last two posts is the best diet plan is the one you will follow. I am more a fan of guidelines rather than rules and I tend to get a bit OCD when I’m counting calories. @maya54, I’d get really frustrated with WW. If I don’t want it, I don’t want it and I’m not going to eat something just because it’s part of the plan.
@HMom16, my weight loss pattern sounds much like yours - lose, then rebound. This is the first time I’ve been successful in maintaining before trying to lose more. Is there a transition to a less restrictive diet after the 6 weeks are up? That’s where I always struggle.
I had a good message from my coach this morning. One of the things I have noticed is that I fall into a pattern of thinking I have earned food because I exercised a lot and my husband encourages that way of thinking. No way no how. I told her I had added some cardio after weight training and she told me to stop it. It isn’t part of my program, it isn’t part of my running program, it’s just extra. There’s no benefit there. More isn’t better, better is better. So today I’m trying to redirect my attention back to healthier eating that will lead to fat loss which is my goal.
@sabaray Yes, there is a transition where you gradually add more starch and fat until your weight is stable. However, you can also continue on the more restrictive plan until you’ve lost the weight you need to lose (in my case this will take more than 6 weeks.) The transition is also where I struggle. I think that in this case, I would need to continue eliminating certain foods rather than adding back limited quantities. For example, I could add start by adding back brown rice and other whole grains but still eliminate pasta.
I think the cycling you’re describing is a good way to approach things. Lose, maintain, then lose again. That has actually worked well for me. I had pasta for the first time in a long time on Tuesday - it’s one of my favorite foods but it’s also one I tend to overeat. For me, elimination is better than moderation. One of the personal restrictions I set for myself quite a while ago was no eating food from any “restaurant” that had a drive through window. I lapsed a bit on that as I realized there were healthy choices available, I just hadn’t been taking advantage of them. I have a bad habit of going to Chipotle but have modified what/how much I’m eating there - one bowl is easily two meals now.
@maya54 I’m curious about the exercise thing. Do you not enjoy any exercise? Do you feel pressured by discussion of exercise and fitness. The fact is, the more you move, the more you get to eat! You do burn calories when you exercise, which is a key part of weight loss and maintenance. Not to mention the huge benefits for overall health and cardiovascular fitness. I’m just curious what your philosophy is about this. 15000 steps is OK, but that doesn’t indicate if you are raising your heart rate at all (purposeful walking) or if that is walking to your car and the bathroom.
Or- are you looking for an eating plan where you eat 10 almonds at 10 am, 8 bites of chicken breast at noon and half a banana at 3 pm? (not trying to be obnoxious- we’ve all seen these things…)
@MomofWildChild No. I’m not someone who really enjoys exercise and I find discussions of it incredibly boring. I walk pretty fast about 2-3 times a day since starting this “get healthy” plan and get in about 4K steps each time. I certainly have not needed more to lose weight at a pretty good clip, so far.
As I said, other than losing some weight after childbirth, I’ve never tried for a sustained period to lose before and have been overweight for quite a while so this is my first real experience. I’ll see how it goes, but for now my interest is in diet.
I am definitely not looking to an eating plan like the one you talks about above. I am interested in how people are choosing to eat to be healthier and lose like the discussions above about restrictions, cycling etc…
@sabaray writes:
I think a really key takeaway from these last two posts is the best diet plan is the one you will follow.
^^^ Yep. I agree. Or another of way of thinking about it is, meet yourself where you are and set yourself up for success.
When my kids were wee, I was cooking a lot, and working full-time. I was also reading books and blogs & sharing tips with friends online about eating healthy for optimal wellness. In hindsight, I’m not so sure it was all that good for my mental health.
I started to look at regular food at the regular grocery store or a regular restaurant as the enemy. It’s not organic. It’s factory farmed meat. It’s loaded with partially hydrogenated soybean oil. Even the real food options were not real enough. It’s coated in wax, it’s sprayed, it’s traveled 1000 miles to get here…
I had online friends (moms) in MN and VA who were making trips to local farms to get fresh unpasteurized milk, making their own yogurt, getting veggies from co-ops or backyard gardens, making fermented vegetables, buying 1/4 cow, 1/2 hog, fresh whole chickens, and filling their freezers.
Our family did not have the money or the time or the sources to match those efforts and I was sometimes consumed with guilt that I was not doing the best for my family. Reading about other’s clean living and cooking from scratch and “I’d never touch THAT food with a 10 foot pole” was not making me feel any better.
A few things helped. Probably the biggest help was the kids getting to be teens and largely making their own food choices — and that morphed into me rarely cooking. Freedom! I was no longer pouring over new recipes, reading health blogs daily, or excessively worrying about how clean & nutritious every morsel of food was.
This may sound silly, but it was a big deal when I was able to buy conventional eggs at a regular grocery store. For awhile, we would only buy fresh local eggs at the farmer’s market, next tier down was organic free range at Trader Joe’s, and next tier was Phil’s, and never ever regular conventional eggs.
Those kinds of “rules” were not making me any happier living in this world.
In a similar fashion, using MyFitnessPal (MFP) helped free me of thinking I was consuming way too many calories. Despite my focus on food, I was and still am somewhat, ignorant of portion size and calories. So, perhaps you can imagine how freeing it was to see I could – and should — eat another 600-700 calories before the day’s end.
With MFP, I quickly learned that no, that little packet of dark chocolate peanut butter cups at Trader Joe’s are not worth the calories for me. I’d much rather sip on a cold beer at the end of the day, or have a RX Bar on the run.
I also learned with MFP that if I “indulge” in helping coworkers demolish a bowl of pretzels at a work meeting, I don’t have to restrict like crazy the rest of the day because of “all those unhealthy calories”. Hullo! It’s 300-400 calories, NOT 1300-1400.
I also do better when I eat a lot of the same foods day in and day out. Less new foods, less thinking about food, less new recipes, less decision making and that background noise in my head quiets.
And seriously, I have never had a full blown traditional eating disorder, although I think one can see from my story that it’s not exactly a comfortable healthy relationship with food. IME, a lot of women feel that way. In some ways, food can be the enemy. Those Xmas cookies I’m expected to bake, and then work so so so hard not to eat!
So, still, I do have rules, but I think the rules are much more workable now, much more flexible, and much better for my head.