Weight Loss Thread

I attribute at least 50lbs of my ~140 lost to drinking 0 calories. I mean, I still went out on the weekend, that's whatever, but no juice/soda/beer/energy/whatever at all otherwise. Diet or water only. Was a big deal for me to drop ~1000 calories a day of mountain dew. It's an easy step and will take you far.

We ended up coming down on a pretty mild version of a carb cutting diet. No sweets, no sodas, no rice or potatoes or whatever. The only real starchy food we've got now are sweet potatoes. No sugars in general. We're basically doing an 80/20 thing and I'm trying to get my wife to look at the "off" day as rewarding herself by having a soda or something sweet or whatever. This is pretty much what I have already been doing, except with fewer carbs. I'm not really worried about myself, just trying to get something my wife can stick to and see some kind of results. We'll see how it goes the next couple of weeks.

chaos_sl said:

We ended up coming down on a pretty mild version of a carb cutting diet. No sweets, no sodas, no rice or potatoes or whatever. The only real starchy food we've got now are sweet potatoes. No sugars in general. We're basically doing an 80/20 thing and I'm trying to get my wife to look at the "off" day as rewarding herself by having a soda or something sweet or whatever. This is pretty much what I have already been doing, except with fewer carbs. I'm not really worried about myself, just trying to get something my wife can stick to and see some kind of results. We'll see how it goes the next couple of weeks.

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This is a fantastic plan. It is, word for word, what I tell my friends and family to do when they "just want to lose some weight and be healthier."

Giving up pasta sucks ass. I can still make it for the kids, I guess. It is just hard to give up something so easy, so filling, and so delicious. Rice I'll be ok without but pasta makes me have a sad.

I, an Italian American from "Little Jersey", gave it up and I really haven't looked back. On the occasion I do have it now I make my own, and it has become a special treat that I can appreciate more. Honestly I prefer it this way.

In general if you have the willpower to stop eating something you "think" you can't do without you'll find that you stop craving it. When I was 280lbs back in college I literally felt like I couldn't go a day without eating ice cream or ring dings. Once I stopped eating that garbage the craving for anything sweet went away, to the point where now I'm not even tempted to eat the plethora of cookies my mother and grandmother made for Christmas. Sweets do nothing for me anymore.

It can be tough to give up easy to make food though. I'm lazy when it comes to dishes and the less shit I need to dirty to make a meal the better. Pasta is like the best thing on earth for that. Just wash the pot which was filled with mostly boiling water anyway.

I used to make pasta 3 - 4 times a week at home, usually an entire box and a full jar of sauce at a time for a single meal.

It was hard to give up at first, but now it's been over a year and a half since I made pasta at home and I can honestly say I don't miss it. I still occasionally order it when we go to restaurants but I view it more as a treat/cheat meal nowadays than a staple of my diet.

I don't get it, do you people eat rice and pasta daily or something?

The only starchy shit I can say I eat every day or regularly is... bread. It's just too hard to fucking avoid, especially if you don't cook for yourself.

New Years resolution: LEARN TO FUCKING COOK.

Yeah, when I compose meals for my family I always include a starch component. Or I did. That usually means rice or potatoes or pasta. It is a difficult mentality to get out of.

Bread is really easy to avoid. I am living proof and have been for the past 10 years.

Learning how to cook healthy meals that my kids will still eat has been the biggest challenge for me. My middle child won't eat anything at all - if it is labeled "dinner" she just won't eat. It gets so discouraging trying to cook healthy for 4 other people that I often just go back to comfort foods. We end up eating a lot of grilled cheese and pasta (which they still won't eat). I'd really love to find some healthy meals that my kids will actually eat.

Also, how do you get quick food out and get something that is absolutely terrible for you. My husband doesn't cook, so when if I don't feel like cooking one night we end up eating shitty food. Need to figure out how to add something easy that he can help with that isn't really bad.

And yes cutting out sweets. That is for sure my biggest weakness. I have terrible cravings for something sweet so I really just need to clean all that crap out of my house and go cold turkey. Makes me sad.

I guess things have changed since I was a kid. Mom made dinner and if we didn't like it, we didn't get to eat. It was a simple system.

Since the wife and I don't have kids, it's hard to get a read on whether that would work nowadays or not.

lindz_sl said:

Learning how to cook healthy meals that my kids will still eat has been the biggest challenge for me. My middle child won't eat anything at all - if it is labeled "dinner" she just won't eat. It gets so discouraging trying to cook healthy for 4 other people that I often just go back to comfort foods. We end up eating a lot of grilled cheese and pasta (which they still won't eat). I'd really love to find some healthy meals that my kids will actually eat.

Also, how do you get quick food out and get something that is absolutely terrible for you. My husband doesn't cook, so when if I don't feel like cooking one night we end up eating shitty food. Need to figure out how to add something easy that he can help with that isn't really bad.

And yes cutting out sweets. That is for sure my biggest weakness. I have terrible cravings for something sweet so I really just need to clean all that crap out of my house and go cold turkey. Makes me sad.

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A quick and easy thing I do when I don't feel like cooking is I just take a pork tenderloin and cut it into small steaks and cook those in a pan with some salt, pepper, and olive oil. Simple, but tastes really good and doesn't take a huge effort to cook. Pair that with whatever veggies. It is pretty much impossible to fuck it up.

My kids, i dealt with the same kind of issues. Our pediatrician told us not to worry so much about what they eat at one meal or even in one day, but rather look at the entire week. That has been helpful to me, rather than stress everyone out by making a big deal about my kid eating one meal I just let it go and make a note if they don't eat something. Inevitably, if they aren't sick, they make up for in on the next meal.

lindz_sl said:

Learning how to cook healthy meals that my kids will still eat has been the biggest challenge for me. My middle child won't eat anything at all - if it is labeled "dinner" she just won't eat. It gets so discouraging trying to cook healthy for 4 other people that I often just go back to comfort foods. We end up eating a lot of grilled cheese and pasta (which they still won't eat). I'd really love to find some healthy meals that my kids will actually eat.

Also, how do you get quick food out and get something that is absolutely terrible for you. My husband doesn't cook, so when if I don't feel like cooking one night we end up eating shitty food. Need to figure out how to add something easy that he can help with that isn't really bad.

And yes cutting out sweets. That is for sure my biggest weakness. I have terrible cravings for something sweet so I really just need to clean all that crap out of my house and go cold turkey. Makes me sad.

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I really, REALLY hesitate to give advice on how to get kids to eat healthy because I don't have any and don't know what it is like being a parent. That being said, if I didn't want what my mother made for dinner she'd say that's fine you must not be hungry and I wouldn't get anything else. I also wasn't allowed to raid the fridge for the rest of the night either, with the exception of that night's leftovers.

But, I always remember it being that way. I imagine it is much harder and more stressful to start that kind of thing when your kids are older.

As to quick/easy meals, it takes a bit of effort in the beginning but eventually you pick up some "go to" things. My super lazy go to snack is some cottage cheese and an apple, but that isn't a meal. Monday (and sometimes Tuesday) night's meal is almost always the stew I made on Sunday reheated in the same pot. It generally even tastes better the next day. For a quick salad I dump a bag of spinach in a bowl and dress it salt, pepper, garlic powder, some dried spices, olive oil, and red wine vinegar. Additional veggies are cut up and added to my level of ambition.

Meat and fish are really fast and easy to cook in general. Slice the meat into ~3/4 inch slices, some butter in a cast iron pan, ~2 minutes a side and then its done. Fish is even easier, some lemon juice and dill, throw it in an oven for 20 minutes and it is done. You can cook it in a pan too but that is more effort.

Homemade Tzatziki is fast and delicious. Find some good, plain, full fat Greek yogurt (Or in my case it's Turkish). The only ingredients should be milk, cream, and bacteria culture. Grate a cucumber and mix in salt, lemon juice, olive oil, mint (fresh or dry), and garlic if you are feeling ambitious. Put that in the yogurt and bam there you have it. Makes no sense to buy since it is so easy to make and costs a lot to buy it fresh from the store.

I'll post more quick things as the come to me. I honestly don't even think about it anymore.

Don't eat dinner, you can wait for breakfast - thst is our policy too. Doesn't make her eat though. It's just discouraging for me more than anything else.

As an addendum, all the meat I buy is from a butcher and it is all local/grass fed. That is super easy to do here in Norway because everything most butchers carry is Norwegian (local) and all Norwegian meat is grass fed. Whenever I am back in the US the price of the grass fed meat at see whole foods is shockingly high. Higher than even in Oslo which is one of, if not the, most expensive places in the world to live.

So, and this is a huge step you don't have to commit to, if you are able to afford to buy and store a side of beef from a local rancher that grass feeds I highly recommend it. It is a big up front cost, but over the course of a year might even save you money compared to supermarket meat.

lindz_sl said:

Don't eat dinner, you can wait for breakfast - thst is our policy too. Doesn't make her eat though. It's just discouraging for me more than anything else.

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The other day I made roasted potatoes with garlic and herbs. I love them, my wife loves them, 2/3 of my kids love them. My oldest HATES potatoes and rice. But my policy is that she has to take one bite, that's it, just one. Because I don't believe her mostly. No one hates rice, it doesn't even have a taste. So she took her bite, and then held it in her mouth until she forced herself to vomit on my table. I was so pissed off. Talk about discouraging, jesus. But mostly my feeling is that it is a power struggle for kids, they are not in control of so many things in their lives that food is one thing they try to exercise power over.

lindz_sl said:

Don't eat dinner, you can wait for breakfast - thst is our policy too. Doesn't make her eat though. It's just discouraging for me more than anything else.

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She might just not be hungry, and that's fine. I really don't get hungry often either, and I usually only eat 1 snack and 1 meal a day. Is she eating other meals? Are they a good size? Big lunch and breakfast? Play a sport? There can be lots of reasons she just isn't hungry, and unless she is sick it's probably alright.