Weight loss

Lately I feel like I've cracked the code (for me at least) for reasonably quick weight loss, at will. I have learned how to break through some of the stubborn plateaus, at least to a point.

Between my normal 16:8 fasting style of eating and focusing on high protein and reasonably low carb, stringing just a few of those types of days in a row for me triggers very measurable weight loss. Focusing on the protein has resulted in me feeling like I'm pushing food into me rather than trying to restrict my calories like I basically have since my early 30s.

The weight loss is almost scarey fast now, and I've broken the weight loss cycle a couple times just to make sure I could also turn it off at will. I have had measurable (i.e. 1 lb or more) losses for as many as 4 straight days in a row.

I haven't seen weight loss like this since I did phase 1 of the South Beach diet many years ago where I lost ~15 lbs in 2 weeks. Unlike that diet where I wasn't getting enough food to feel full and severely restricting carbs (i.e. not even eating fruit), what I'm doing now is very sustainable, other than it almost being the opposite problem of having to eat more food than I may want.

For ha-ha's, we went clothes shopping and I tried on a pair of 32 waist jeans, and they actually fit well. My 33s were starting to feel too loose, and I was comfortable in a 34 waist as recent as this past January. I'm seeing what looks like a little more muscle in my arms, while actually being able to see my ribs for the first time in a while when I raise my arms up over my head.

Pushing protein has been a game changer for me, but I'm also eatting plenty of fruits, veggies, and even dairy now,

At some point, weight loss should obviously stop being a goal. My real goal is to be in the realm of not being overweight. If I Google "What should a healthy 66 year old man that is 6' 1" weigh", I get a range of 189 to 204.

As one gets older, IMHO it is good to be slightly higher in that range to maintain some reserve. My goal is to have my new norm be 200 lbs. To achieve and maintain that, I think that I need to get to, and maintain, 200 lbs till my body adjusts to that weight. For that to happen, I probably need to be able to see lows close to 195 lbs or so. Once I do, I see no need to lose more weight.

When I'm talking calories/day, I'm referring to "Net calories". This is what I consume minus calories burned from additional activity. By focusing on getting the protein I need, the rest of my numbers more or less fall into place other than making sure my fat doesn't exceed my protein. That just means biasing towards lean protein.

BTW - While I likely sound anal about all of this, I do have meals and even whole days where I say, "Fuck it", but by the next day I'm back to my normal eating habits. If you don't allow for those days once in a while, people tend to fall off the wagon and never get back on.

"...but always take your weight in the morning"

As mentioned, I do. Same scale, wearing nothing. It can be a little later on weekends as it's the only time I get to sleep in, but other than pee trips, I'm not sitting on the toilet till late morning/early afternoon.

Today my weight was the same as yesterday. My doc said he wasn't concerned but we'll watch it. All my other #'s look good except for an elevated BUN, which I'm sure many keto/carnivore fans are likely familar with. My fasting glucose dropped 6 points from my last physical, so that was good, as it was borderline before.

My sleep is fairly consistant. Sometimes it dips below 7 hrs but most times it's right around 8. I do track that along with meals and activity levels. While you REALLY have to watch it with ChatGPT, it is cool that it can ballpark non-traditional workouts. For example, it understands 3.5 hours of mudding a ceiling, or 3 hrs of painting.

I think some people like to think that weight loss is simple and linear based on cals in/out. Over time, that is likely true, but I think it's a bit more complicated with short term losses/gains. The body is a machine that's constantly trying to adapt and seems to resist change, until the Borg attack (i.e. resistance is futile) ;-)

My take-away from this is that it is likely the result of using different muscles in different ways for extented periods of time as part of our kitchen remodel.

That would mean I basically ate nothing for 4 days. Prior to the estimated # of calories burned from activity, my total daily calories have been roughly 2k+.

Mayhem, the numbers you just gave would be about an 8,600 calorie deficit over 4 days, which is not likely given the other information you've provided.

Since boosting my protein, some weight is actually coming off. Hard to tell how much is from diet and how much is from activity I don't normally do though. In the middle of a major kitchen remodel, so things like sanding and mudding a ceiling for hours burns some calories. I've had a few days recently where I've burned around 1K calories from my activity, and my net calories on those days was in the 1300-1400 range. My norm just to maintain is ~2400 cals/day, so winding up with a 1K/day calorie deficit likely contributed.

After trying so long to lose a few pounds, it's almost scary how quickly it's coming off. My weight for the last 4 days was 207.0, 205.2, 204.8, and today I'm 204.6. This is DAYS, not weeks. I actually do have a physical today, so will get to talk to the doc about it. I strongly suspect it's the combination of diet and extra exercise from the kitchen remodel, but never hurts to get my doctor's take on it.

FWIW - I do weigh myself at the same time on the same scale naked, so it doesn't seem as though this is just water weight.

Fresno_Power_Couple - Sorry to hear about the MS. I recently found out that the wife of a couple we're good friends with has MS as well. Apparently they can manage that pretty well these days because you'd not know it to look at her.

No doubt the healthier living will never hurt either. Very cool to be so self sufficient when it comes to your food supply. We are nowhere near there, but I do at least see raising chickens for meat/eggs at some point in our future once we settle in to being more home bodies vs the go-go-go we do now. Something to be said for that too, and especially the social interactions that go along with an active lifestyle.

Both of us have but via different avenues:
My lovely wife has MS and is managing with plant based diet and exercise. In addition to that she has almost completely lost her sense of taste due to the condition. Without that reward eating is just another chore for her and she lost almost 100lbs in less than a year back when all this started.

Me, keto and lifting heavy since I was 18.

We both workout but not as heavily as we used to. Just enough to keep up our muscle tone.

Our situation is such that we grow/raise most of our own food. She bakes bread from the wheat we grow, we consume the lamb and chicken we raise, and God willing shortly we will add a few Dexter cows for meat and dairy. I think this has a great deal to do with the fantastic health everyone on our homestead is in. Being closer to nature is the best medicine.

It’s all very very trad, literally no one would guess we’re sexually degenerate deviants lol.

Well done OWC we basically do same along with hard daily workouts, change it up from free weights to aerobics including some classes, lot of fluids, and also some sports thrown in to round out what we do and eat!

Enjoy the eggs and cottage cheese mix...along with some cut up avocado in the morning.

We take many vitamins daily along with minerals , pre and pro biotics .. its working for us especially magnesium at bedtime with NAC .

Add swinging , dancing and great FWB and you have a great mix to stay healthy!

Kudos to all who have a plan!

owcangrace - I have added cottage cheese to my eggs to get an additional protein boost. I actually like the tase of cottage cheese anyway. Only thing is I usually make omelets and tried blending the egg with the cottage cheese. It doesn't hold together as good as egg alone, so may just make an omelet and add the cottage cheese like you would regular cheese rather than trying to mix the 2 together.

It does work fine though if you're making scrambled eggs. I do still have to suppliment with my collagen powder to hit my daily protein goals. I already have and use that so it's just as easy to add that vs whey or pea protein. I do also like peas BTW, which as far as veggies go, are relatively high in protein.

We have eliminated seed oils from our diet except for when we eat out which is hard to control. We use beef tallow and ghee to cook primarily though use avocado oil(spray) for lower temperature cooking. Use olive oil for non cooking needs. We eat only 3 ingrediant sourdough and multi grains that have no added preservatives, fructose etc and are whole grain. On those they are frozen and then toasted to lower the glycemic load. Beyond that whole foods with a definite lean to protein and watch our other carbs. If you haven't tried scrambled eggs made with cottage cheese give it a go. We put "clean" sausage in with it and its packed with protein and delish.

Someonescoming - I think that anyone that has cared to look has noted that high glycemic index foods are not a healthy choice. We certainly have a large enough population of diabetics that have known that for quite some time.

I think it's good that someone is potentially looking to do something about it. Everyone has known for a while that we are subsidizing and pushing products (like HFCS) that are bad for our health just so someone can make a buck. Can you imagine the class action lawsuits (ala tobacco style) we'd see if someone linked HFCS to diabetes like they did for cigarettes and lung cancer?

One problem though is that if you try to restrict things from people these days it's like telling a teenager they can't do something. It just makes them want to do it all the more in some cases. I seem to remember that being the case for limits on sugary soft drink quantities in fast food places.

As I said in the recent related topic post, it is easier to eat healthy when the things you want to eat are made with healthier ingredients. Imagine if we could subsidize the healthy ingredients like we have for the stuff we know is causing health issues?

owcangrace - I have an Amazfit T-Rex. Among the other things you mentioned, this thing lasts over a month on a single charge. I thought it was expensive way back when I bought it at $85, but they're closer to $150 now. It was annoying to me that the typical smartwatches needed to be charged so often.

Normally, tech like this gets smaller, faster, cheaper, but apparently not always.

mayhem - you might want to get a fitness tracker like Fitbit etc. We wear Fitbits and it has taught us a LOT about what is actually happening with your heart, activity, sleep monitoring etc. I can assure you vigorous sex is exercise! The Fitbit picks up on it lets you know how much and what level of exercise you had. It automatically gives you a guesstimate on calories burned based on the factors you feed in and its monitoring. It tells you what level of exercise you have and for how long. You notice things like you want 20 mins of cardio, well guess what the first 2 minutes are needed to get you into cardio. It can measure your BOL, detect AFIB. captures your sleep cycles and how much time you are really sleeping. Being in bed doesn't = sleep not does it necessarily equal good sleep. We pick up older models on Ebay and have been wearing them for almost 10 yrs. Won't be without them as we find the info too valuable!

I started off my weight loss program by radically cutting all sugar from my diet,
one of the hardest things I ever done. I lost 20 lbs. in one month which was a hugh motivator to continue loosing weight.
The book, "I Quit Sugar," helped a lot. Down 40 lbs. now and house parties are a lot more fun.

One of the things I use for work is AI. There are a number of different ones but I find ChatGPT easy. There is nothing to install. Just go to ChatGPT. com in your favorite browser and you can log in as a guest or create an account. If you create a login it keeps track of your context.

Once logged in, you just type things in as if you were chatting with a real person. What I did is tell it my age, height/weight and approximate activity level. I told it I eat only lunch, dinner, and a snack, and then asked it to design a meal plan for a week with the goal of losing 1 lb/week. It did.

I then asked it to add columns showing the macronutrient content (i.e. protein, fat, carbs) and calories for each meal, and one with daily totals. I asked for it in a table, so I could easily cut/paste it into a spreadsheet.

There are some snacks and sides I like, and did not like some of the suggestions (i.e. I dislike salmon) and had it alter the weekly menu plan based on that. I also told it that I have a large appetitite and the protein looked a little low to me, so asked about that. Sure enough, it was lower than I wanted so I had it adjust things based on my preferences and what are considered healthy norms.

While I will likely not follow this menu verbatim, it was nice to see an example of a healthy meal plan for a week. One other thing I did was to ask it to identify quantities, like ounces of meat and cups of other foods like veggies and snacks. Spits it right out with those changes.

It cost nothing to do this and gives you a really good idea of how to put together meals that you can easily live with, since a lot of the suggested meals were based on things I told it that I typically ate anyway.

If people haven't yet tried this, it's definitely worth a few minutes to check it out. When I was in grammer school, calculators were not allowed as it was considered cheating. This almost seemed like cheating on life lessons, but it is a useful and powerful tool that can help people get and stay healthier and/or meet some fitness goal.

I do not. I stopped that just before Covid hit.

Do you still train BJJ ?

For the health insurance pre-diabetes prevention/weight loss program I'm doing I noticed that the activity list does not allow for a misc activity. I figure sex is as good of a cardio workout as any, so have been entering that in as part of my "workouts".

The program wants you doing 2.5 hrs of exercise per week, so if sex counts, I am easily getting that in, especially after adding in my body-weight resistance and isometric routines.

"" Very low sugar and carbs and make a lot of your own meals.""

That is how we choose to eat. We try to only eat veggies we grow and meats from local farms where we know the owners and trust what and how they feed it before processing it. Eating whole foods is the way to go imo.

I have been roughly following the South Beach diet since just after Christmas. I was seeing a morning weight of 220 lb after Thanksgiving. Prior to that I was closer to 212 lbs for quite a while. This morning I was a tad over 213 lbs.

I've done this diet before with decent results, but I think adding the food/calorie tracking will make a difference. I am gaining a much better understanding of the caloric value of the what I'm putting in my mouth now and learning more as I go. The other thing I'm doing for at least 30 days is eliminating alcohol.

The ideal would be to find a good diverse combination of tasty filling food that can allow me to feel satisfied within the # of calories I need to maintain my weight. Getting full is one thing. Feeling full for a while is the real trick. I think the Keto or South Beach diet may be sustainable for me, but not Carnivore. I think I'd get bored with just meat. I can see getting hungry and just not wanting any more meat.

The human body seems to respond to "stressors" by getttng stronger. Weight lifting is one example. If so, it may actually be good to spike your blood sugar once in a while with indulgances, but definitely a path to diabetes for many to do that day after day. This theory means that occasional pizza or dessert may actually be good for me ;-)

I am currently doing a health insurance sponsored program using an app called Lark. The program is actually a diabetes prevention rather than a weight loss program. As part of the program, they give you a free digital scale that automatically sends your weight to the app. That's kind of nice but a more important thing came out of it.

I think that simply tracking what you eat will create an awareness that will allow you to lose weight. The app is connected to some sort of AI where you put in what you eat and it gives you an idea of how many calories that is. The app is just a convenient place to store/monitor that, but the AI was the more important piece for me.

The good new is, if you want, you can use something like ChatGPT and track this yourself, or there are probably hundreds of free phone apps you can use. I've been reluctant to do this because I couldn't see myself weighing every single food item I ate, but by using AI, you can get things close enough and take the high end of the range that the AI gives you as kind of a worse case.

For example, I went to ChatGPT and entered my lunch as "Calories in 4 oz chicken breast, bowl of tomato and chickpea soup, very small chopped salad, 6 sweet potato wedges, iced coffee with cream". It told me the calorie range of each comma seperated item as well as a total range (i.e. 520 - 790 food calories).

Based on my weight, activity level and age, it would be ~2400 calories to maintain my weight (again, based on AI), so all of this tells me if I have a calorie deficit or surplus for any given day. Knowing this is kind of critical if one really wants to lose (or just not gain) weight. Also based on AI, I'd need to average about 1900 cals/day to lose 1 lb/week. I can lose more weight or eat a little more by increasing my activity level.

Beyond that, I roughly follow a Glycemic Index diet, meaning I actively do things to minimize spikes in my blood sugar. This is above and beyond the program I mentioned. At least for now, the program has only focused on calories, activity, sleep and weight, but I'm just starting it. One would think that a diabetes prevention program would address the nutritional content of what you're eating and not just the calories.

just wanted to say congrats on the weight loss. If you have more to go just be consistant! If you are at your goal...great!! Congrats again!

My company health plan offered me a free weight loss plan. Very low sugar and carbs and make a lot of your own meals.
I just checked the app I have to use to keep track of weight loss.
I have lost 38.8 lbs. In 6 months.
I was shocked.
Has anybody else lost a lot of weight fast?