I’ve been dieting on and off for a few years - managed to lose a few kg in the process (I know people further west and even here use lb but as I matured in mainland Europe I got use to kg and never kept track of conversions). I used to be skinny as a rake, but when my mobility dumped me, after running 15km every night and regularly doing marathons and half marathons going to not even having any leg muscles (something that hit me extremely hard at the time) I started piling on the weight.
Started at 65kg/143 lb (6ft/1.8m height) in the mid 90’s and got all the way up to 114kg/251 lb 5 years ago. Now I’ve got it down to 105kg/231 lb and I keep seeing people making seemingly absurd claims about weight loss. Normally I just eat a lot less, but that alone isn’t a guarantee of trimming those extra flabby bits.
Twice I’ve seen “doctors” (who knows if they really are) on the internet claiming that if you give up sugar you can lose 1kg a week!
Although I still have 1 sugar in my cups of tea, I dropped everything else a week ago - and guess what? Today, 1kg less! So I’ll try and keep it up - but it’s soooo hard. I get some really nasty problems - shakes, sweats, feeling of lack of energy etc - but I’m determined to keep it up for at least another few weeks to see what happens.
In the old days if I thought I was putting a bit of a flab on, I’d just go for a run for a few days (before I got into distance running) but now I can’t even run across the road.
So, anyone else? Want to see what we can lose this year?
Refined sugar is a helluva drug. It is positively addictive. You are going through withdrawals.
Me I have never been skinny, but when I was fighting, I walked around at 86kg, drying out to 83 (middle weight) for fights and tourneys. Now I’m steady at a a smidge below 100. I remember when I bought a new bed in my fighting days the guy asked me my weight. I asked him how long we would use the bed, he said at least twenty years. I said 100kg. He said wut?!, you look a healthy 85 to me sir! I said I aint gonna be doing this forever, and I know I’ll be a 100 when I hang up the gloves. And so I did.
Of course being a landscaper, a lot of the 100 is muscle, but I got a good firm dad-belly going. Is good, got some weight to put into the hammer when I ram a fencepost home.
Back when I was fighting, I used to be quite particular about weight and food intake. Of course I ate a lot. About 2500 to 3000 kcal a day. But I was very fussy about refined sugar, that stuff is the devils’. As are drinks like fanta, cola, etc. Thing is, once your body is used to a certain amount of sugar, it feels weak when having to do with less and always craves more. Bit like some other powdery white stuff
I won’t be running in a weight-loss contest. I’m fine with my buddha-nature But I’ll cheer you on from the side, waving my axe about!
P.s. try to change those lumps in your tea for a smidge of natural honey. Better for you.
Thanks - I do use honey, but usually in a mug of hot milk before I go to bed. Don’t know what kind it is, I’ll check. I know honey probably counts as sugar, but I used to have honey plus a teaspoon of molasses sugar in my hot milk - I dropped the sugar
Of course honey is mostly sugar, but its refined by bees, not a factory. It’s less deleterious to your health than the pure white. Think of that as being too pure. It’s no good.
Fruit also contains a lot of sugar, but packaged in such a way that your hairless ape body is far better equiped to deal with. Grapes, bananas, things like that are easy to scoff down, will take away that low-bloodsugar-feeling of general meh-ness and pick you up while also giving you vitamins and fibers.
Thanks. I often drink cammomile tea with honey but today was my first time with black tea and I liked it, so I’ve switched to that. I checked and it is natural honey.
I also stopped using molasses sugar on my breakfast (shredded wheat) and switched to chopped cranberries, but I’ve noticed they have a high amount of sugar, too (as well as the chopped dates I bought for the same purpose), so once they are gone I’ll go back to slicing up a banana on my breakfast. Good bananas are hard to come by here, though.
Fruits are my go-to whenever I have a craving for something sweet. Bananas, apples, blueberries, strawberries, kiwis and grapes are a great way to satiate that sugar hunger. Another thing that helps is taking one tablespoon of unsweetened natural peanut butter (two a day max since it’s calorically dense).
Another thing I like to have once or twice a day is a small bowl of vanilla yogurt with almonds, pumpkin seeds and a little bit of granola.
I am a bit lucky in that regard. First cola I drank as a kid was diet, because my mom only drank diet and my dad didn’t like cola. Regular Coca Cola tastes funny to me.
I grew out of sugary drinks, they caused me trouble. Even my favorite chocolate chip cookies began mysteriously causing problems years ago (at random).
I get my awful food intake in other ways, don’t get me wrong. And every so often I have a day of sugar binge, but that is the limit. I don’t even care for birthday cake - because of the sugar.
Maintaining exercise is the current issue for me - finding and dedicating the time to it. As a desk jockey, my work doesn’t burn off the fat or the lunch!
Through the pandemic my body finally turned the metabolism dial back from 11 to something more sensible but the appetite is still there. Didn’t use to be an issue back as a kid because walking or cycling to school every day was ~1.5km each way, up hill both ways (for real, there was a small valley in the middle! We don’t mention it was also downhill both ways. ) on top of the other exercise you get just being a kid. I accidentally had a cardio regiment and was none the wiser. I wish the office was that close by now!
Find some motivation though, however obscure. I went from 6’1” and 135lbs underweight in my late teens to putting on some (healthy) fat and muscle at 175lbs and now am stuck just shy of 200lbs with the belly growing. My motivation? I don’t want to buy new pants. I just sized into my new waist, finally built up a wardrobe - and don’t need it to be all for nought. Also my motorcycle riding jeans were about $400 and I’d rather skip meals than have to buy a larger pair!
@Wes
Ha, at least you’re not alone. My main motivation for maintaining my 185cm 80kg weight is to fit into my motorcycling leathers ($1200 Dainese)… and so I don’t look like somebody 'painted a cow" at track days.
And sugars - I know there are good sugars and bad sugars. If horses get too much bad sugar they can suffer from a disease known as laminitis (basically the hoof starts to delaminate due to a build up of fat). I just try to avoid as much sugar as I can, including carbs/starchy food and like Chuck reach for the fruit when I need to scratch that itch.
heh heh - that was me, too, back in the 90’s. Had my first ever leather trousers (the ones I’m wearing in that photo of me on my BMW that I posted). I was sooo sad when I finally gave them to a charity shop!
But now I found another pair that fit me - not quite up to the same standard, but good enough for £100. Size 40 now. That sounds bad, but I was 44 not long ago.
I read a notice at my GP surgery that said you can tell if you are “clinically obese” as a man, and give lists of height vs belt size. Mine is 40 - so I’m currently on the edge of the abyss! But am going the right way…
There’s been a lot of research into “low carb” style diets, and there’s now pretty overwhelming consensus that skipping on long-chained carbohydrates is not in any way conducive to losing weight (i.e. keto diets asf.). Short chained carbs on the other hand, are something that our body isn’t well equipped to process, so cutting those out as much as possible is definitely a good idea.
Well I’m no expert - far from it. What really frustrates me is times when, like this time last year, over a period of weeks I’ve lost a large amount of weight and am completely clueless as to why. Especially that time last year, when I thought I was eating a lot more than usual - so I carried on eating the same things and then put a few kg back on!
My exercise regime, which consists of a daily walk with my dog and in good weather making sure I do as much riding as I can on my motorbike, rarely changes much, so that isn’t the cause (edit - plus as much as I can do with VR to exercise my arms, every day)
Equally frustrating is times when I’m doing well and losing weight as intended and suddenly it stops and (an apparently well known phenomenon) I have no idea why it has stopped. This has drawn me back to just giving up in the past - but I’m wiser now
I can understand those mysteries being demotivating.
A good way to take control would be to keep a food diary. There’s plenty of apps for that, or you can just jot down the calories of everything you eat and drink. It is a bit tedious, but worth it if you are serious about managing weight (whether you want to gain or lose it). Estimating calorie intake intuitively is notoriously hard.
Unfortunately, walking is not something I can do a lot of, hence just the one walk per day with mutt. Even that is only about the circumference of a football field. I can go further on occasion, but I go through phases. At the moment I struggle, so it’s not on.
I did start swimming a few years ago and it went very well - I went as far as a membership of the local gym to use their pool whenever I wanted, rather than just the aquatherapy sessions that my consultant had agreed to sign me up to.
That ended badly when the pillock decided to stop my biological medication “to see how you get on”. Was fine for a couple of months, then things went downhill badly and quickly. Ended up on crutches for months! I am keen to get back in the pool, though. It’s a shame the sea here isn’t a bit warmer - or that we don’t have the same healthy mentality as in Germany, where man-made lakes to swim in are commonplace.
I lost 3.5kg in 4 weeks - so not quite 1kg per week but not far off. Unfortunately I seem to have reached a ‘plateau’ now, so just have to be patient. Probably cos I’ve not been very active the last week or so.
After giving up the refined sugar and mints and such-like, I switched to a teaspoon of demerara (brown sugar) in my tea, coffee etc as we had a pound in the cupboard. After that I tried molasses sugar but although I thought it tasted okay, my stomach rebelled. So I’ve now switched to jaggery, which actually tastes just like the demerara in drinks, so that’s good.
All other stuff I used to have sugar on such as cereal and rice pudding, I now have either fresh or dried fruit on instead. And I actually enjoy it more
So, next report in a couple of months, or when I manage to drop below 100kg, whichever comes first. Oh, and when I get below 100kg I’ll be phoning my local airfield to get a flight in their dH Chipmunk! The weight limit is 101kg. Might even have a go in their T-6 Harvard after that.
That’s fantastic news, Johnny! 3.5 kg in 4 weeks is very good. Plateaus are to be expected, it’s all about playing the “long game” and finding methods that are sustainable for you (I can’t stress this enough). Everyone’s different, and I often find that when you know what you’re willing (and not willing) to compromise, it’s much easier to stick to a plan. It’s a matter of being honest with yourself and see what is manageable. Some people go cold turkey for a month then give up. I think your approach of gradually reducing sugar intake is much better since, as I’ve said, it is something you can keep doing with consistency. The best plan in the world is useless if you can’t follow it.
Only thing I will say from personal experience is that it is always MUCH easier to lose the weight than it is to maintain that weight loss over any length of time. I do however wish for you that you are one of those individuals where that truth does not apply.
have to look that one up!
) on top of the other exercise you get just being a kid. I accidentally had a cardio regiment and was none the wiser. I wish the office was that close by now!
