Weight Loss Thread

When you say massive cheat day, what are we talking?

Also, why are you concerned about water weight? If I was you, I'd stop looking at the scale and start focusing all your willpower on pushing through the issues you are encountering every two weeks. If you are getting tired of keto, are you eating the same thing every day? Have you tried making some of the more interesting keto recipes to see if those can stave off your boredom?

Obsidian said:

This thread is not super active, but I'm hoping someone can give me some advice. I'm not fat really, but I think I fit the description of skinny fat pretty well. I'm 5'8 and generally hover around 165 lbs, but I have little chicken legs, stick arms and moobs with a gut. My body sadly stores all of it's fat in my mid section basically. For the last month, I've been trying to lose weight. My diet has slightly improved by virtue of doing a small salad with 6 oz of grilled chicken for dinner 1-2 times a week instead of whatever I was normally eating before, and I'm also using a treadmill 5 days a week. I typically use an interval program on my treadmill which keeps a steady incline of 2° and a variable speed with changes at random every 2 minutes, between 3.5 and 6.5 mph. Both my watch and the treadmill typically estimate my calorie burn on a 25 minute usage to be ~300-380 calories (depending on the variability of the speed). Let's totally ignore the theoretically improved diet and focus solely on the treadmill usage, vs total sloth before. During this stupid pandemic I have essentially just sat on the computer like 8+ hours a day and done basically nothing, and now I'm using the treadmill as mentioned 5 times a week. Let's go on the low end and say 300 calories per usage, I am theoretically burning 1500 calories a week vs 0 before. Somehow since I've started doing this, I've gained 5 lbs, up to 170. I'm not understanding this at all, what the fuck is my body doing

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Losing weight is all about how you eat. Think of exercising as an activity for injury prevention, overall fitness and cardiovascular health. Not weight loss.

If you burn 300 calories on a treadmill that extra spent energy is going to make you feel hungrier than you would otherwise. If you are not weighing your food and keeping a diary you really have no idea what you are consuming. That 300 calories burned is moot if you're eating an extra 450 without realizing it.

TL;DR Keep exercising, it's good for you. Get a food scale and start paying attention to and cataloguing what you actually eat.

Download MyFitnessPal and use it to track your eating.

As the others have said it's more about what you eat. Myfitnesspal is great for starting out, logging what you eat. After you do it for so long(say at least 90 days) you'll be much more aware of your caloric intake and if you stick to that same diet, know roughly how many calories you're consuming without necessarily tracking it every day.

Doing that and the walking will shred the pounds, and that is fine if that is your only goal. But, you will have to develop a workout routine as well if you want to tone your body at all.

Also, I'd say its probably normal for someone your size their weight to fluctuate +/- about 5 pounds, so you may have been dehydrated or well cleaned out when you first weighed yourself and/or you may had been retaining water (due to high sodium) when you next weighed yourself. Just keep at it and you will lose weight if you clean up your diet.

I've lost another 15 pounds or so since covid started so I have officially lost over half my starting body weight, losing about 165 pounds. Using a free workout app I downloaded on my phone called home workout helped get me there. No equipment is needed to get started and I've added dumbbells and kettle bells since starting.

Your biggest enemy is yourself. We're all guilty of this shit, especially in the winter.

One thing people don't realize is that it is okay to be hungry.

Letting yourself be hungry and focusing on what it means, how it feels, and how it affects you makes reducing your food intake dramatically easy for several reasons. First, just because you feel hungry doesn't mean you are actually hungry. You have a hormone in your body called ghrelin and it causes you to feel hungry. It also just so happens that ghrelin levels are highest during your normal feeding times, whether you are actually hungry or not. Its a hormone that was important when food was scarce or when humans were in environments where you couldn't be sure when you last ate. In any case, even though modern man doesn't need it, it still exists and it works against you when trying to lose wait. Second, for the vast majority of our existence we have been food insecure. That means our biology developed with cyclical eating patterns as the norm and so there are processes that your body only goes through when it doesn't have easy access to stored glucose. It is the whole idea behind the combination of ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting. If you are overweight, you have literal days (and weeks and possibly months) of stored energy on your body in the form of fat but your body has been given easy access to glucose energy for so long that it doesn't burn that fat for energy as readily or efficiently as it should. After eating low carb for a while and doing intermittent fasting (or reduced eating windows), your body starts to realize that the days of easy glucose energy are gone and starts going to the well of fat for energy more efficiently. This is even more true as most of us are now at least into our 40s and our hormone profiles have reduced natural metabolism. Third, and this is more important than most people realize, exercising makes you hungry. It is really great for your overall health and wellbeing, but I personally am not a fan of increased activity specifically for weight loss. If you are going to go that route, though, you have to realize that your body is incredibly efficient at expending energy to produce work and it will immediately signal you to replace that lost energy in the form of extra calories. If you fall into that trap, you will get healthier, but may not lose weight.

If you want to lose weight for good, then the best thing you can do is start fasting. I personally recommend low carb diets, as I believe them to be beneficial and easier to sustain then other similarly effective diets, but that is up to personal preference and your specific biological reaction to the diets in the form of weight loss. For fasting, there are lots of resources on the net, but I would start with this guy (an actual medical doctor who studies the subject and treats patients with these methods):



If you are interested in low carb diets and the science behind it all, I would check out this channel:

Lost 20 lbs on low carb over the last few months.

Little exercise. Some strength training, almost no cardio. Some walking.

I feel amazing now compared to where I was. Every once in a while I eat garbage and now it makes me feel so bad that I don't enjoy it even though my mind tells me I should miss it.
I look forward to the low carb meals now and enjoy them more.

I am doing mostly 1 meal a day with a protein shake supplement. I was worried about losing too much muscle while I intermittent fasted.

The key is routine and it's more difficult than it sounds because of life. Once your body gets used to food at certain times it always wants that. Its hard to break but easy to maintain.

Tredge said:

Lost 20 lbs on low carb over the last few months.

Little exercise. Some strength training, almost no cardio. Some walking.

I feel amazing now compared to where I was. Every once in a while I eat garbage and now it makes me feel so bad that I don't enjoy it even though my mind tells me I should miss it.
I look forward to the low carb meals now and enjoy them more.

I am doing mostly 1 meal a day with a protein shake supplement. I was worried about losing too much muscle while I intermittent fasted.

The key is routine and it's more difficult than it sounds because of life. Once your body gets used to food at certain times it always wants that. Its hard to break but easy to maintain.

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You can stop worrying so much about the muscle loss. It turns out that fasting is a muscle sparing activity. It also doesn't make much sense biologically that our bodies would cannibalize muscle before fat in times of energy restriction.

Falxy-US said:

Of course they tell you about diet. The problem is with your first word: fatty. The majority of people are too lazy to get off their ass and do any exercise, or improve their diet. I think in training I ever saw one or two people that went out and made lifestyle improvements that actually benefitted them.

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I had shitty doctors, and shittier dietician. Literally had better success with a google search and and YouTube. Doctor had the conversation I described earlier paraphrased of course, when I pressed him he said to cut calories “calories in calories out” eat less and move more and recommended me to a dietician. Dietician had the same shitty advice as him except she gave me meal plans. Googled the cure for type two diabetes came across Doctor Jason Fung and read his book the diabetes code and watched him talk on YouTube which lead to fasting channels and in 3 months no more type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and cholesterol. I’d been taking high blood pressure and cholesterol medicine for years, move more and eat less is one of the biggest fucking lies told by people in your profession. I dropped over 120 pounds without ever fucking exercising.