Learn Me: maintaining a "healthy" bodyweight.

A few years ago I dropped 50 lbs.  Part of it was depression when Baltimore Girl dumped me.

I just plain ate less.  Your weight is always going to be the sum (or difference) between what you intake, what gets absorbed, and what gets pooped out.  The calories thing is pretty much an old, debunked thing at this point.  it's not necessarily the total number of calories, it's what kind of calories.  If you eat 1000 calories of sugar, it's nearly all going to get absorbed and turned into glycogen and/or fat.  If you eat 1000 calories of salad, half of those calories are cellulose, fiber, and other stuff that just passes through.

Just eat less and eat smarter.  Exercise helps, but take a look at how many miles of jogging or biking it takes to burn off a Quarter Pounder from McDs.  It's like two hours at 15mph on a bike.  I still run every once in a while for health/muscle/heart reasons, but exercise as weight loss has it's limitations.  Weigh lifting does wonders for building muscle, but given that muscle weighs more than fat for a given volume, it won't necessarily help you lose weight.  you'll have less FAT, but not necessarily less weight.

PS... I'm not an expert, so this could all be horse dung, it's just what I've picked up over the years from doctors, nutritionists, and a biology background.  Consider it an informed opinion.

The_Jed said:

   I'm seeing a pattern beginning to develop. Those that have achieved a lower bodyweight seem to have prioritized cardio over weights. It looks like it might be time for me to follow suit

No.

I saw this earlier and wanted to respond but I was on the road.  I've been through this and found something that works very well for me. It may not work well for you, but I also learned a bunch of stuff along the way.

You should stop the Keto now and develop a healthy eating routine that works for you. Keto is not sustainable, and I'm pretty sure you are looking for a long term solution.

If you're already exercising don't change your routine to allow cardio. Cardio is the least effective type of exercise for pretty much any purpose, especially weight loss. It does not burn fat. If you think you need cardio, lift weights faster.

You can not out train a bad diet. Exercise is important, but it's not a tool to lose weight. You need to cut calories

A dozen years ago I was attending the gym regularly, but also 30 lbs overweight. I started counting calories and quickly realized that I had no idea what I had been eating, calorie-wise. I fixed that and developed the routine I have now, cutting out some things I really liked, like toast and peanut butter before bed time.

I work 12hr shifts, and my work routine is, two hard boiled eggs on the way to work. 9AM I eat my biggest meal of the day, a full size dinner, often what we had for dinner the few days previous, or something I would make strictly for work. Noon I eat a salad - a vegetable salad with home made oil and vinegar dressing, no cheese, ranch, etc., with some crackers, or melba toast. Between 3-5 in the afternoon I eat a generous portion of watermelon, about a liter size container, maybe more. On the way home I eat two bananas. By the time I go to bed I'm starting to get hungry, but only starting, and it's manageable. I work 3 days a week, and always lose weight on my work days. On my off days I will eat a large traditional breakfast of bacon, eggs, home fries, or a very large portion of peanut butter on some heavy whole grain toast. No lunch and (because of PW's Euro background) we eat a large, but often healthy dinner with lot's of veggies about 3 in the afternoon. That's early, and may take a bit of getting used to, but it usually lasts until bed time.

Portion size goes along with calorie cutting, but I think eating the large meals early helps. My portions are not generally small, and it's very difficult to eat too much veggies, and fruit.

I'm 5'6"/144 lbs, 60 years old and in excellent shape with well developed upper body, legs, and 6 pack. My entire gym routine is resistance training, predominantly lifting weights. I do zero cardio

I lost 95 pounds during the first year of the pandemic through cardio and diet. From 5' 10" 255 to 160.

I peaked at 30 minutes, twice a day, five days a week on a stationary bike. Hard.

Diet: I never counted calories exactly, but I tried to have a rough idea. Best thing I can say is eat less of everything. I had to fundamentally reset my idea of how much food was enough. That said: I cut way back on soda (including diet), no milk (didn't give up other dairy), drastically reduced breads. Less red meat, more poultry and fish. That was during the week. On weekends I allowed myself some good meals out. Call it cheat days or whatever. I don't love the term but without something to look forward to I'm not sure how long I would have lasted.

At this point I'm in maintenance mode and exercising way less, but I've kept all the weight off for over a year. I've hesitated to say I've "quit" this food or that in favor of cutting back because even though I haven't had soda of any kind in over a year, someday I may want a Pepsi and I don't want to feel like a failure if I do. I've cut back on breads, but I love pancakes and by god if I want pancakes on a Saturday, I'll get them. I just won't have pancakes for breakfast, then rolls with dinner and cake for dessert.

I don't have to be perfect, I just have to be good enough, and so far it's working.

Edit to add: I started this as a 100% "hold my fries and watch this" effort. On paper I did everything wrong. Didn't tell anyone about it to hold me accountable Didn't set measurable goals. No clue how if it would work at all or how long I'd be able to stick with it. I know nothing of the science of weight loss. Don't understand the reasoning behind keto or intermittent fasting or "net" carbs or anything else. The only thing that made sense to me was "if I burn more calories than I eat, I'm pretty sure I'll lose weight," so I tried not to make it too complicated. So these days, here's what my diet looks like:

Breakfast: piece of fruit--apple, peach or similar

Lunch: ~2 oz sliced chicken/turkey, 2 oz cheese (let's call it two slices of each) on a low-carb tortilla

Afternoon snack 1: one cup Icelandic yogurt

Afternoon snack 2: bowl of grapes

Dinner: small chicken breast w/a sweet potato or small salmon fillet over salad greens or ground turkey tacos in low-carb tortillas.

Dessert: two normal sized cookies or even a Klondike bar. I've been able to get away with sweets so long as I pay attention to serving sizes (so one ice cream bar is fine, but  I can't be trusted to serve myself properly from a tub of ice cream).

With this diet, 15 min of hard cardio 5x/week has been sufficient, although lately I've been doing more just to see if I still can. 

I can't say what will work for anyone else, but this has absolutely worked for me.

In reply to Peabody :

I love that chart.

It also is going to be different for each person.  The way your body absorbs and stores calories from fat could be totally different from how mine treats it.  That's why you get one group of people saying "Paleo sucks, Keto always rocks" and another group saying "Keto sucks, Paleo always rocks."  I'm sure that's because one of them worked well for that individual and/or it was easier to stay on that diet based on their eating habits.  Probably pretty hard for a Vegan to do Keto, for instance.

When I was discussing with my doctor about weight loss he said all of the diets can work to an extent, but he wanted to do some blood tests before I did Keto and one other one...  I assume because I have a history of gout, and lots of meat proteins can cause higher uric acid levels making it worse.

So, I guess my advice is... ask your doctor?  Or three or four doctors?

The_Jed said:

   I feel as though I have yet to fully grasp proper nutrition. From January until May of this year I had been consuming 70 grams of fat, <120 grams of carbs, and >160 grams of protein for a total of around 1,800 calories (+/- depending on protein intake);

Have you gone to see a doctor to get hormone and thyroid levels checked?

That is a lot of exercising with not a lot of calories. This implies something may be up with your body that we're not able to diagnose here.

Lifting heavy tends to lead to bulk, but that seems like a lot on you. I'm 5'9", and hold ~185 lbs with a lot of muscle. I mix cardio, lifting, and climbing. I exercise a lot more than the average person, but less than you do. I don't splurge, but I don't pay close attention to my diet tracking macros or calories. It wouldn't take much for me to drop 10lbs if I wanted to focus on climbing instead of  lifting. I'm 40.

If I ate <2,000 calories/day, I'd be hungry all the time, cranky, low energy, and shedding pounds. My wife has been tracking macros and calories closely (first to lose weight, now to bulk up to a healthy 125-130 lifting weight). She has to eat over 2,000/day to get up to 125.

I think you probably need to speak to a doctor.

Eat the least processed foods possible. Eat meat that is an identifiable part of an animal. Eat fruits and veggies that look like fruits and veggies. Dried, canned and blendered food is not great. Frozen is better and raw is best. Cooked from raw veggies is right up there with raw.

No sugar or sugar substitutes. Fruit juices are soda without the bubbles. Do not consume! 

I do admit it takes awhile for your tastes to re-adjust after eating a typical American diet. We do actually eat some refined sugars but are highly selective. Home made cookies from my mom or maybe some high quality ice cream. But things like baked beans, soda\juice, and facotry fruited yogurt are no goes.

Notice I didnt say anything about exercise. You know how to do that already, but its the food companies leading away from what people are supposed to eat. Eat like you are living off a farm. Dont eat packaged food.

Sugar bad. Procssed food is bad. 

I dropped over 30 lbs after coming to this conclusion a number of years ago. I need to start exercising however.

Using calories to measure nutrients is not great but we dont have anything easy to replace it.

We dont have a fire burning inside our bodies torching our food. If you ever noticed corn in you dookie, those calories didnt get fully count. Salt doesnt have a caloric value yet we all know it affects our bodies. Same with the fake sugars, you cant tell me your body doesnt react when you consume them, regardless if there are calories developed when you burn them in calorimeter.  

100 calories of carrots and 100  calories of carrot juice will have a different effect on your body. 100 calories of Oreo cookies is way different. No one has ever noticed a partially consumed oreo in the John after a Number 2.

One habit I have developed for myself that I like is I drink a large glass of water first thing each day before eating or drinking anything else. 

If you want to turbocharge the idea, do it before each meal.

So #1, go see a doctor and get a check up.  Ask them to run a complete blood work up, including thyroid.  I graduated college weighing around 175, no fat.  When I went to dental school a few years later I bounced up to 185 due to stress.  Then lost it due to different dental school stress, weird, right?  Active Duty I weighed 172 because I had no stress and plenty of time to work out.  I didn't watch my diet, I still had a pretty fast metabolism and was swimming everyday or mtn biking or something.  Then I met my wife and started hanging out with her vs working out everyday and bounced up to 185 again.

Then had kids, a business and stress again.  Weighed 203 for years, couldn't do much about it, no matter how much I worked out I weighed 203, I'd just look different.  Then I started to creep up, weighing 210+.  Summer of 2020 I felt like crap and it wasn't covid.  Went to my doc, he ran tests, didn't find much.  I pushed the issue and went to a friend who was an endocrinologist, turns out I have Hashimoto's disease, which is a thyroid thing.  I'd probably had it for years, ever since I weighed 203 I bet.  Went on meds, cleaned up my diet some and I weigh 192 now.  If I did more of a calorie deficit I'm pretty sure I could get down around 185 again.  175 isn't happening without bad things happening to me, which I don't care to have happen.

So go make sure you're healthy.  From there it's about cardio and making sure you're in a calorie deficit if you want to lose weight.  Don't eat stuff that comes in a box or a bag, try to avoid refined sugars and carbs.  I do a modified South Beach diet, in that I do still eat carbs but whole grain bread and the like.  The meds for the Hashimotos fixed my thyroid problem, which jump started my metabolism, so I get seriously HANGRY.  I literally "must eat now" when I get hungry, so I have to be careful when/how much I eat to make sure I'm going to make it to my next meal.  Otherwise I'll just cram whatever I can find into my pie hole.

   Thanks, will do. I'm overdue for a visit to the old sawbones. 


   Yesterday I woke up feeling rested and energetic after sleeping only about 3 1/2 hours so I slammed some coffee and hit the gym. I had a decent pull workout (day 2) but my legs were TOAST from the lunges. Then, later that night at work, I had another lower body workout. We have huge sand mixers at work that use large, steel arms to stir the sand before it's dumped onto a conveyor and eventually makes its way into a mold flask where it's pressed into a mold. Anyway, somehow three of these large steel arms got bent and I had to change them. Both of our elevators are currently out of service so I had to lug the replacement arms up six flights of stairs, swap them out, then carry the damaged arms back down six flights of stairs and drop them in a steel/iron hopper.


Super sore today!

Working off shift and not getting enough sleep isn't helping. You can push through a day or two, but after that... with my kids I spent about a decade with crap sleep and it's crazy how getting out of that cycle just makes everything better. Even with decent exercise I was 10-15lbs heavier, with much higher blood pressure. I forgot about that phase, guess there are brain mechanisms to block it out without specific triggers 

In reply to Paul_VR6 (Forum Supporter) :

   Now that the kids are older (15 and 16 in a matter of days) it's much easier than it's been in the past. When they were little it was brutal! I also earned much less so the problems were compounded by adding a lack of funds to every situation. 

A couple of quick thoughts:

- get to a doc for basic bloodwork and a metabolic check (how many calories you burn in a day)

- get sleep (more important as we age)

- cut out diet soda

- count calories (I use MyFitnessPal) and to a lesser extent macros, and weigh yourself daily. I track my weight via a Garmin watch and their app.  When I've been lean, I attribute 90-95% of my success to these two factors. This is the only way I've been successful in holding myself accountable.

The_Jed said:

It's kind of my own mash up of Bioneer Batman training 2021 (cheesy, I know but, I really like it) and a routine I would set up for someone wanting to score well on the ACFT. 

Honestly, how are the Bioneer's programs? I love his fitness stuff and I've been planning on taking the plunge into them, because I find my work doesn't NEARLY have the fast-twitch activation I should have.

It almost seems like this should go in Builds and Projects. lol

GRM Bodybuilding thread when

In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :

   I REALLY like his programs. Though I did make a few tweaks for it to fit me. I scaled back the pushups on the Batman program a bit because wow...that's a ton of pushups. I also like throwing my lower body anterior chain in with my upper body push days and my lower body posterior chain in with my upper body pull days, instead of doing the push, pull, legs, total body layout in his program. I prefer a total-body-type program to the typical PPL layout.


   I also switched out the hand/eye coordination juggling and such for speed bag work, hitting a double-end bag, and punching a tennis ball attached to my noggin with a stretchy band/string. 


   For my pushup sets, I still do them as he recommends; I try to hit 100 reps in as few sets as possible, going to absolute failure with each set. 


   I highly recommend giving the program a shot. There's also a Barman Begins program to introduce someone to that style of training and lay the foundation for the next program. 


   Or, you could even skim through his videos and jot down the exercises he views as the most beneficial and build a program around those. I've done that too but, if I were to do it again, I'd like to run Batman Begins as it was written.


   




   

   On a side note, I've slowly increased my protein intake and decreased my fat intake over the past few days and my bodyweight slowly crept back up after hitting a low of 189.0 a few days ago.


   189.6, 189.6, then 190.4 upon waking today.


   Today I added in some carbs. I feel quite a bit more energetic and ready for today's workout.  

I have been following the Intermittent Fasting Diet for 40 years which I learned while working construction and discovered that if you ate breakfast or lunch and then tried to bend over all day, it resulted in severe stomach distress so I would only eat one meal a day; supper. It worked for 30 years. I'm the same size and build as Chuck Norris. 5'-10" and wiry. I used to weigh what his fighting weight was, 154 pounds.

Not so much nowadays, my one meal still consists of just supper, except that it lasts from about 6:00 pm until I go to bed at about midnight. My fighting weight now hovers around 190 pounds. I did lose 15 pound after having Covid 19, but that didn't last long. 

I was a vegetarian for 4 years way back and only weighed 140 pounds, was always hungry and always cold, but after a weekend camping with meat eating friends, it was eat a hamburger or die. That was the best tasting hamburger I have ever eaten.

In reply to The_Jed :

That's less than a 1% change. I wouldn't make any decisions based on that. 

Seeing a doctor is a great idea.  Then find a nutritionist/dietitian and talk to them.  My daughter was a weightlifter a few years ago, she learned a lot by consulting one.  What I remember was you need a certain amount of intake to burn the fat.  YMMV but from the description you are doing almost everything right, just need some minor changes.  And what works for another person might not work for you.  

Your workout makes me tired reading it but I am curious how do/did your parents carry weight? Similar body type?

Nutrition and fitness is not at all my expertise but from what I have read I would +1 the elimination of all sodas and any fruit juices you may be drinking.

Peabody said:

In reply to The_Jed :

That's less than a 1% change. I wouldn't make any decisions based on that. 

No, definitely not. I know it's just water, I was commenting...kind of logging, I guess. :)

When I mentioned logging my weight every day, that's really a mechanism for not letting a day of letting myself go turn into a few days. I want to my in-laws yesterday, ate a ton, and had two bowls of ice cream when I got home. When I stepped on the scale today, I was up 3lbs, so I know that I should be pretty strict with what I eat today. Without weighing myself daily, I would have overeaten again today, and ended up +5 lbs for the weekend.

I say once a week. I vary three pounds a day just based on the temperature at work, how much salt I ate, and how constipated I might be.  I lose two pounds a night in bed. My recorded weight comes Sunday morning pre breakfast  post poo.  If I wanted to lie to myself, it would be Friday morning, pre cheat day.

286 to 245 since February on Weight Watchers and getting more active in the shop since a staff change.  Stalled for the last month or so, mostly because I can't believe I'm back in my 240s and it seems unreasonable that I could get down to 220.

6'2", and built like a sturdy guy.  180 would require a horrible disease...

The bodyweight numbers may seem low but, I'm not exactly dainty.


This is me a few years ago at 180 when I was running 5/3/1/ Triumvirate (great program btw). I had gotten down to 170 a few months prior to that video.    https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Ffacebook%2Fvideos%2F10200803718207541%2F&width=500&show_text=false&height=281


This is me a few years ago in the low 190's. I currently look similar, though I'm actually stronger now, which is weird.   
https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Ffacebook%2Fvideos%2F10201406495716602%2F&width=500&show_text=false&height=281


I tried finding some pictures/videos of me at 160 but, apparently, my vanity goes only so far. Though I do have the requisite shirtless abs selfie. LOL

GIRTHQUAKE said:

The_Jed said:

It's kind of my own mash up of Bioneer Batman training 2021 (cheesy, I know but, I really like it) and a routine I would set up for someone wanting to score well on the ACFT. 

Honestly, how are the Bioneer's programs? I love his fitness stuff and I've been planning on taking the plunge into them, because I find my work doesn't NEARLY have the fast-twitch activation I should have.

It almost seems like this should go in Builds and Projects. lol

GRM Bodybuilding thread when

Grassroots Exercisesports