weight lose advice...

Durakken you mentioned not being able to find scales that work for you, well I use Salter digital scales, they work up to about 450 lbs which is fortunate for me as I am about 440 at the moment (All weights are translated by Google so may be somewhat off).

To all the people saying that you will never lose any weight by walking short distances, and that you will never lose weight by eating one meal a day, I hate to disappoint you but reality doesn’t match up with your assumptions.

25 years ago I was a figure skater, three days a week I would walk approximately 10 miles per day as well as doing the training (I had almost qualified for trials for the British youth Olympic team) and another two days a week I would walk about 4 miles and swim another 5-10. Then I was in an accident on a bus and my lower spine got mangled.

Three years ago I was sent for a full medical as part of a job that I was applying for, the doctor took my weight (nearly 700lbs) and then my blood pressure, he then calmly walked out of the room and in a quiet but scared voice asked the nurse to call an ambulance.

I have had no medical intervention, and no help from any weight loss professionals, I eat one meal a day, and can walk just slightly over two miles before the searing agony in my lower back causes me to sit and weep for a while, and my weight this morning was 184kg (405 lbs).

To quote the motto of a local superstore "every little helps" sure it would be great to instantly switch over to the "ideal" diet, and take up a long distance running exercise plan, but for some people that just is never going to happen. As with anything worthwhile you will have to work at it, but most diet and exercise plans are written for people who are overweight by choice not by circumstance.

Your back problem sounds different from mine so I am not sure if the same will apply to you, but over the past couple of years I have slowly been able to work up from being in pain (and out of breath) after 2-3 minutes of walking, to being able to walk for nearly an hour before the pain really kicks in. To most of the people reading this thread that will sound really un impressive, but to me it’s an amazing change.

I had some quinoa as a base for stir fry a few weeks ago after reading this thread.

So hey, Durakken, how goes the weight loss?

Rian, asked a few days ago in PMs and this is what I said... Instead of rewriting the whole thing I'm just posting exactly what I PMed him back...

I was gonna make a follow up post ^.^

I dunno whether it's helped yet as I don't have a scale yet.

i got one of those recombinant bike things you suggested (the pedals only one) and since I got it I'm trying to figure out where to use it because all the places I have to sit are too short and thus can't really do it.

I switched up my eating habits within what i can v.v I found that I can be fine with 1 fruit every 4 hours (or roughly 400 calories a day >.>), but that is unhealthy so I'm working on other stuff to eat to fill in those calories.

So after I failed in the first thing I was doing. I decided to figure out the number of cals I should be eating, which is just over 2700 average. Then I split that into 4 meals, 1 every 4 hours. and while I am not 100% on keeping to the number of cals per 4 hour block I am making sure to try to keep within the cal count for the day, keep my eating periods split up, and if I do eat over the 2700 i don't eat more than the weekly total. Which means even if I over eat one day I am fine overall.

After 2 weeks I just got used to keeping a running total in my head of the calories and such so I didn't write them down this last week, but I'm well below the goal.

While this is still not the healthiest thing possible it's better than how I was eating previously, probably.

I decided not to order the fruits veggies online as they wanted $30 for delivery and that is just insane. I do have afresh fruit place around here I remembered, but it's a pain to get there every week, so I'll likely only have fresh food only 2 weeks out of four.

This method lets me eat still what's easy to get ahold of, but keeps myself reigned in. Hopefully over time I can move more to healthier foods, but I can't garentee that so the best thing I can do is work within what I can.


Btw... with the recombinant bike, pedal thing... It has a calorie counter and over the course of 20 minutes (struggling and discomfortable and using my arms instead of legs due to not figuring it out how to make it comfy or without probs yet) it says I burned 100 cals, is there a length of time or amount of calories i should try to reach? 100 cals doesn't seem to be worth it since I could just not eat that amount...


Also >.> whoever writes those cal counts I hate. They should just write down a rounded hectocalorie and the amount of cals in the complete product. It would be a lot easier to keep track of as bigger numbers tend to throw people and the extra 0s tend to be worthless I've noticed.

Those calorie counters are best estimates. You may burn more or less. Start small and work yourself up to longer and longer times. The thing that stops most people is they overdo it the first time, end up sore as hell, and then stop.

The thing about the exercise is that the more you do it, the more your body will burn the calories after you stop. If you are cutting out 100 calories and burning 100 calories, you are actually making a 200 calorie reduction. That's why diet and exercise tends to be effective, since you are hitting it from both angles, rather than just the one.

Another thing is dont get to hung up on what the caloric intake you should be eating is. Yes there is a healthly level of caloric intake, but that is based on a average humans height etc, plus assuming average activity which its likely if your severly over weight your not reaching.

Plus i am betting here, that most doctors would rather see you drop some decent weight then worry to much about eating to few colories. Keep in mind that when obese people get their stomachs stapled and such, they are eating much fewer then optimum calories for quite some time, and its one of the reasons they drop such good amounts of weight in that first year or so after the operations.

So im willing to bet that if you dropped weight a bit quicker then the 2 pounds or whatever a week that is considered healthy for a normal person a doctor would probably see it as a plus to lighten the strain on your body, joints, back, heart, lungs etc that being chronically overweight causes. The trick is when you can become more active doing so and then gradually starting to balance that weight loss into the healthy range. But in the long run its more unhealthy being to large then losing an extra couple pounds here and there.

Possibly relevant to the conversation...

How effective, if at all, they are? *shrug* But they do make things tastier.

Diet and excercise. It really is that simple.

In your case the diet is by far the easiest one to alter. One big meal per day is just about the worst way to eat possible.

Exercise is harder for you due to your ailments. The pool recommendation is ideal, but will require a large commitment and lifestyle change that may or may not be feasible for you at this time. I see the pool as something you would do down the road once you have made some life alterations and you are ready and able to devote more of your life to achieving your health and fitness goals.

In the interim I suggest either a bowflex or a total gym. Both are low/no impact and both scale very well as your strength increases. Both work with limited range of motion and expand on it as your mobility and strength improves. You can get both for ridiculously cheap intro offers and once you try them for a month or two you'll be more than willing to shell out the full price. Comparatively a recumbent bike is not only expensive it is very single purpose which can lead to boredom and early plateauing. Additionally, you will likely find that as your strength/fitness improves you will need to invest more and more time on the bike to continue progressing. This also contributes to exercise boredom and premature peaking. The latter is something that bowflex/total gym tend to encounter a lot less due to the numerous exercises and how well they scale up with increased fitness without additional time investment.

Aside from that weight loss is actually very simple science. At the end of the day if what you put in is less than what you put out you will lose weight. Spacing meals properly so that your body does not go into survival mode and retain maximum fat aids and accelerates what is essentially a simple equation.

Other than that you have to want it for yourself enough to make the sacrifices and alter your lifestyle in meaningful ways. It doesn't have to happen overnight (and is less likely to succeed if you do jump in with both feet and drastically alter your life all in one shot), but over time it does need to happen.

Lastly, the best advice I can give for dieting is to have a cheat day (usually recommend 2 when you first start) per week. You need to reward yourself for your commitment the other 5-6 days of the week and this is tremendously powerful in preventing diet stagnation, or worse yet abandonment. Trust me when I say that eating better 5-6 days of the week and then going nuts on the 7th is still leagues better than eating crappy all the time and you'll actually have a hope in hell of succeeding with it.

That last little bit I learned from working with bodybuilders who frequently gain 50-100lbs in the offseason and are among the most disciplined dieters in the world. Numerous of them have confided in me that rewarding your commitment with a cheat day is as important as the healthy diet itself.

edit: a nice easy first step to changing your eating habits is to pick up a tub of protein. For you I'd suggest a meal replacement one because you suck at eating and this is a really easy way to get in to the habit of intaking food more frequently. DON'T do the protein bars though, most of them are just chocolate bars in disguise. The actual process of preparing a shake (which only takes a min or so) will start to get you into the habit of taking the time to prepare quick and easy meals. Soon enough stretching that to 10 mins (which is all it takes to prepare a healthy snack/light meal) will seem like nothing. Once you've graduated past this phase you can start using just a pure protein powder (ie not a meal replacement) because you'll already be eating better and they can be very helpful at keeping your metabolism up as well as keeping you satiated so you feel less need to glutton when you do eat. For reference the meal replacements are generally 250-400 calories per serving and have a nice combination of carbs/fats/and protein, whereas the pure protein powder usually has ~100 calories, next to no carbs and next to no fat.

So basically use the meal replacement to get your body into the habit of intaking food more regularily. Once you learn to do that and learn how easy it is to quickly prepare healthy snacks/light meals you can switch to a pure protein as that will help take you to the next stage of further cutting total calories per day.

Essentially, do it in small, manageable and realistic steps. And be sure to manage your expectations.

Most grocery stores and even walmart carry protein powder/protein meal replacements, as a result they really aren't that expensive and you don't need to go to a specialty store like GNC (which can be intimidating) to acquire them. I consider them an absolute must in altering your intake and eating habits. Some of them even taste pretty darn good to the point you might soon thinking of them as a treat. Some of the designer whey's (bit more expensive) you'd have a hard time telling the difference between them and a glass of chocolate milk in terms of taste, aside from the slight whey aftertaste.

Weight Watchers.

I know, it sounds too easy, but it works. They teach you the basics. You can eat the foods you like. You get a support group, access to decades of experience, and they even have an online program if you don't like going to meetings. Tho, the meetings are great, as they teach you more than just the right things to eat. They also help you get the right attitude, which is KEY to making it all work and sticking with it.

I hit goal in 40 weeks, losing around 2 lbs/week and never starved, never denied myself the kinds of foods I liked, and still played CoH 4-8 hours/night!

Here's a local news package about my WW experience.

Seriously, it's more than worth the price and it's free to sit in on your first meeting.

Eat better and/or exercise more. That's it, really. Anything else and I will laugh at you when suffer from the potentially devastating side-effects that are sure to come from completely ignoring your body's nutritional needs for the sake of being lazy.

Seriously, I will laugh at heart attacks, strokes, and chronic explosive diarrhea; I've done it before...