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[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

Lets kick this off with this.
I am over weight, I do very little exercise outside of my daily routine, and I do not have a healthy diet (or as good as it could be)

This thread should be used to help eachother achieve our health and wellness goals.
This thread can be used to share recipes for healthy food/snacks, and exercise routines for certain things.
Encourage eachother, no downing or insulting
follow guidlines

[Telgin]

Well, I can chime in on this since it's something that I took to heart a few years back.  There's no specific subject yet, so I'll just drop in an anecdote and some token advice.

Losing weight is really hard.  I've known a lot of people who tried to lose weight and either lost very little or didn't keep it off for long.  Most people don't make it out of the "I need to lose some weight" phase I guess.

Anyway, I was able to lose about 150 pounds over the course of about 3 years and have so far kept it off for about 4 more years.

The secret?  There was no secret.

I think that's where a very large number of people mess up with dieting.  I don't think I could have ever followed a specific diet that cut out any specific foods I like, and I'd guess that a lot of people are the same way.  So, instead of doing that, I literally only cut back on how much I ate.  I still ate the foods I wanted.  I just ate less of them.  That's it.  I set a daily caloric target of about 1500-1800 calories, and ate what I wanted until I got to that point.

More specifically, I usually ate a light breakfast and lunch and ate about whatever I wanted for dinner.  By keeping about 1,000 calories open for that meal I was able to eat pizza or just about anything reasonable.  I tried to avoid snacking, but I did buy fruit and light snacks like yogurt for that purpose.

A few other things I learned from experience while dieting:

1. Don't starve yourself.  I tried eating less calories (1200 or so) and all it did was make me feel terrible.  It didn't make me lose weight any faster.
2. Don't expect to do serious strength training while dieting.  It doesn't work and it will also make you feel terrible.  Exercise is good, but pushing yourself to try and gain strength while dieting doesn't work.
3. You really just have to get out of the mindset that you're dieting.  If you're constantly anguishing over the fact that you can't eat what you want, you won't stick to it.  I just got into the mindset of eating a light breakfast and lunch and mostly forgot I was cutting back.

Well, all of that worked for me anyway.  It probably won't work for everyone, or maybe even most people, but it did work for me.


Okay, that rambling aside, I'm currently planning on trying to get back into exercising.  I live a very sedentary lifestyle because I'm a programmer who doesn't like physical labor, and I really could use some activity in my life.  I hear it's also good for stress relief, which is something I desperately need.  I guess mental health counts as on topic for health and wellness.

[Levi]

My brother lost a ridiculous amount of weight just by eating salads for lunch every day.  And possibly stress.  But I think it was the salads that helped more than the stress.

[MaximumZero]

PTW.

[Cryxis, Prince of Doom]

I've lost about 10~20 lb since last year or so because I stopped eating so much
I still have a terribly unhealthy diet at times but its not nearly as bad

[Telgin]

My brother lost a ridiculous amount of weight just by eating salads for lunch every day.  And possibly stress.  But I think it was the salads that helped more than the stress.

I've always read and heard that stress causes you to gain weight (with some fleeting anecdotal evidence I've seen), but everyone probably processes it differently.  What mechanism is supposedly behind this is beyond me, other than the buzzwords that the dieting industry tosses around.

[Arx]

Stress is weird. I turn into a stick-figure under stress because I stop eating, but other people balloon under stress because they eat more.

[Caz]

What kind of exercise/sports is everyone in to? I used to swim a bit, but then they demolished the public swimming pool nearby (jerks...). After that I got into weightlifting. Lifting heavy things as recreation probably sounds ridiculous, but it's fun to me.

[Arx]

I run. Cross-country for preference, but track and road are good to keep in shape.

[scrdest]

I've started and have been fairly consistently exercising since September - all-round stuff with no specific third-party plan, although regular - and it does work, with a caveat - if you are like me bodywise you will, in fact, gain *weight*, as in the total body mass (I went from 180 to 200 lbs) but at the same time, you lose *fat*. Again, from experience - waist circumference, in particular.

Plus, you're less noodly - not necessarily WALL OF MEAT-tier, just not 2spoopy once you lose weight.

Mind you, dieting matters too, heavily - not necessarily any specific diet, but you just plain gotta take in less than you expend so the difference is taken from the reserves, and it means getting used to being hungry or appetite suppression.

Stress is weird.

Quoted for truth - stress does a lot of odd things. Ferex, ever had your gums itch when you're stressed? That's due to your immune system being weaker due to stress, causing mouth bacteria to run amok and inflict their necrotizing, inflammatory badness upon your tissues.

[cerapa]

I have the opposite problem from most people. Skinny as fuck, no meat on my bones.

I basically just don't get hungry sometimes. I mostly do get hungry on most days but the intensity varies a lot, and on some days I don't eat at all until dinner and don't even notice. Might sound like fun to some, but it's kinda nasty when the first sign of hunger is a pain in my stomach that is mysteriously alleviated by eating. And I'm not kidding about that, it took me a while to figure out that those occasions meant that I need to eat something.

Been putting some effort into trying to eat more the past year, but I get easily distracted.

[Arx]

That's exactly my problem. If I have something I need to get done on my lunch break, it takes an effort of will to eat as well as doing whatever.

[FearfulJesuit]

I sort of have the opposite problem: I just don't gain weight. I'm not underweight, but I'm definitely fairly skinny. It may have something to do with the fact that I live on rice and beans (well, not entirely, but at least one meal a day) and don't drink soda. (The occasional glass of sweet tea, sure, although I have to cut that with unsweet tea. I don't like my tea being the consistency of molasses.)

I also bike at least three and often six or even more miles a day, since that's a round trip from my apartment to campus.

[scrdest]

More likely than not, that's hormonal. Hunger isn't caused directly by not having enough food, or energy, but kicks in as soon as someone reminds the brain to be hungry. Read up on ob/ob mice and leptin, 's fun - they do not have the 'K, not hungry' signal working properly - so they eat. Afterwards, they consume, interspersed with some chewing, acquiring nutriments, snacking, taking food, mastication, banquetting and gorging themselves. Then they start eating again.

The end result is this:

[Caz]

Yea, it can be a pain to eat enough a lot of the time. The only thing that I found that helped is calorie counting and making sure you actually hit your target everyday. Otherwise it was a cycle of "today, I will eat all the things!" and feeling accomplished while I failed to notice that for the next couple days I barely ate a scrap. -_-

 Human body is generally crap at estimating how much you've eaten, which leads to the skinny "I eat everything!" and the fat "I hardly eat anything!" kind of claims.