But I love beer more than the Joker loves deadly hand buzzers. Oh well, for the waistline!
Dude I just spent a few hundred bucks acquiring and storing 20 Belgian beers. Trust me, I know your pain.
I’m on 1800 calories a day, and I drink beer. Every single day. Well, except for days when I drink wine instead.
Moderation, amigos. Moderation.
I’ve been in Weight Watchers since mid-January and have lost 35 pounds so far. If you aren’t familiar with WW, it’s just calorie counting. They convert everything to points which incorporates fat (penalty) and fiber (reward) to guide you toward better foods. There’s no mandatory food purchase or gimmicks (like Nutrisystem or Medifast types), just good old fashioned “Burn more calories than you eat.”
I’ve found the system to be quite easy to follow, especially using their website/iPhone app. I’m lucky in that we have meetings every Monday at work, but there are stores/meetings all over the place. The basic system gives you a daily point budget (based on gender, age, current weight, height, and activity level of your job), plus 35 extra points per week. The extra points can be used however you want, and are what make the system ‘livable’. I usually burn most of them on something like pizza once per week. Or, you can use them not at all. At 6’1, 211 lbs, I get 34 points per day. To give you some reference, a point is roughly 50 calories.
All of that has led me to really good eating habits - mostly around finding out how many calories something has BEFORE eating it, and planning out what I’m going to eat. Either at home, work, or even before I go to a restaurant. The iPhone app helps a lot in this regard as well since I can just look stuff up. The first 1-2 weeks were pretty difficult getting used to eating a lot less, but I now consider this system trivially easy to follow. I lose 1.5-2.5 lbs a week and keep on trucking toward my BMI goal of 187 pounds. After I hit that, WW becomes free and I can continue attending meetings/etc as long as I stay within 5 pounds of that goal weight.
Also, you can do most of this thing on your own (say- track calories with the Lose It iphone program), but going to meetings a week to keep you accountable is extremely powerful. Also, I get lots of great food tips on how to eat good stuff for low points.
Even one beer’s quite a bit of calories, moderation or no. If you’re on 1800 calories per day, you can be throwing well over 10% of that at a single beer. :(
Well, as I said upthread, a bottle of Guinness is 125 calories. It’s practically a liquid 100-calorie snack. Is it a bit of a splurge? Sure. But I recognized going in that any diet that required me to give up alcohol was going to be a diet that I’d never stick with, so it was best to find a way to work it in from the start. A single bottle of beer per day is completely do-able, even on a strict calorie limit.
Agree with Vesper, as well. I’m not doing Weight Watchers right now, but Karen has done it, and liked it. Calorie counting (WW or otherwise) is a lot less of a chore than you’d think, especially if you have a website or iPhone app to help you keep track, and it’s very effective.
Yeah, high alcohol drinks are more problematic. Better to save stuff like that for running days, when I have more calories to play with.
My wife uses a Danish site called Madlog, which is basically calorie counting withe the help of a nifty webinterface and a huge database - which means that a lot of recognized brands are already in there. She can enter her exercise, which then allows for a larger calorieac intake that day. She’s lost 24 pounds in 12 weeks and is at her target weight. She wants to run a marathon (is at her third half marathon) so now at her target she’s raised her daily intake so she only loses a little.
It’s really simple (a bit more precise version of WW) and I would be surprised if something like it wasn’t available in English.
I lost about 16 pounds in 8 weeks on a similar diet, but have put most of it on again because of stressing too much to get any exercise in and eating too much sugary stuff.
sounds like sparkpeople.com. Great site with lots of resources. Even has a achievments, trophies and scores.
A couple things that worked for me when I wanted to lose weight that were pretty easy to do and made a world of difference:
-Have lunch be the biggest meal of the day. I find if I do a big breakfast and a small lunch, by dinner I’m STARVING and more likely to go out and eat something terrible or to hit the vending machines. Likewise a big dinner means I’ve felt starved all day and I’ll overdo it.
-Make dinner ahead of time. Mexican layered bakes that are low calorie, lasagnas, if I know I have something waiting for me at home that I can just heat up, I’m less likely to want to hit Friendly’s on the way home.
-Don’t eat meals after 7 pm. This one is pretty key for me since I’m not likely to be doing anything intensive after around 8 pm unless it’s swing dancing night!
-Have healthy snacks available. Don’t buy cookies. You will eat them. And no matter how many times you tell yourself that if you eat them all in one sitting it doesn’t count, it totally does.
-Nix the alcohol and soda. Empty calories! If you have to, have one beer then switch to water.
Yeah, that’s basically what I do, combined with not eating unless I’m truly hungry. I emphasized the vegetables before more than I really do in practice, as that’s just a trick if I feel like munching but know I just ate a bowl of ice cream.
It works well enough for me, as it gives less calories without the headache of using a calorie spreadsheet. I’m not even that strict on when I can eat sweets, so long as it’s not every day, nor on snacking, so long as I try to make it vegetables.
What you eat isn’t terribly important weight-wise anyway, it’s mostly down to the simple volume of one’s gluttony. I almost never finish dinner at a restaurant, especially in the US where portions are so ridiculously big.
Oh yeah, and another trick that used to work for me, until I got acid reflux – grapefruit juice. For whatever reason, it always suppressed my appetite.
Worst thing about America dining: ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT buffets.
I saw some dude who was overflowing over the table in a restaurant booth asking for more on an “all-you-can-eat ribs for $9.99” day. It actually makes me angry.
I will second (third?) the Sparkpeople recommendation. It’s a great site filled with information on diet and exercise, and it has an (optional) social networking aspect that can be just what some folks need to stay on their plan, be it a change in diet or a new exercise routine. Best of all it’s free.
Disclaimer : Sparkpeople.com is the brainchild of a very good friend of mine whom I’ve known for 25 years now. Chris is a brilliant guy who made his fortune off a totally separate venture many years ago, so he’s not out to make a ton of money off Sparkpeople. He and his staff are truly committed to helping people acheive their goals and promoting a healthier world through proper diet and exercise. He lives this stuff, and is pretty much the most energetic and awesome person I know.
Fixed.
The anger and revulsion, generally, trumps the jealousy. Additionally, after one plate of ribs, I would be so full I would blow up. Watching the dude stuff rib after rib in his BBQ sauce stained maw made the jealousy lessen even more.
EDIT: Sparkpeople sounds cool. I just gauge what I eat by feel through stomach growling and guesses as to how much I am eating. Plus, who doesn’t love electronic prizes and achievements.
Hey I was a 250 pound “obese” person just a month ago! Not that I’m anywhere near someone looking at me calling me obese. I started running ~15 minutes a day 5 days a week. I am working up to longer, but as a lazy smoker who never really did that much exercise when he was younger its taking a while.
In under a month I am down to 240. Anyway the moral of the story is yes, eat the same amount and add even a little exercise to your life and you will see drastic improvements. Change your diet to be healthier at the same time and you will see massively drastic improvements.
Its just a matter of self control and dedication if you can add exercise to your life for 4 or 5 weeks without cheating, it wont be that hard to keep up after that.
Rather than have a big breakfast, small lunch, small dinner or a small breakfast, big lunch, small dinner; eat like hobbits.
When I was minding my weight (~3-5 yrs. ago, sadly) I ate 5-6 times a day, 300-400 calories at a time. That prevents the Big breakfast + small lunch = starving at dinner problem, and helps keep the metabolism running consistently.
The other thing that worked for me was to pick one day a week where you could “cheat”. For me, that meant having McDonald’s for dinner on Wednesdays while I read that week’s comics. On “cheat day”, you’re not counting every calorie. Obviously, this isn’t intended to be an “Go to all-you-can-eat places for all three meals!” thing. That said, one of the things that stymies a lot of dieter is the dismay that they can’t EVER eat the food they loved pre-diet.
Not sure if you’ve started the Nutrisystem or not yet, Phil, but let me make an alternate recommendation.
I’ve not been around Q23 for a long time. In fact, the last time I was here was a little more than 6 months ago. I wandered into a thread similar to this one, but about exercise. I saw somebody recommending some exercise program called Crossfit. I looked, and there was a Crossfit gym a couple miles away. So I booked an intro session.
That was October 28, 2009. I was more than 260 pounds and couldn’t climb the stairs at work on one go.
Now it’s six months later. I’m 205 pounds. You can see my abs now. I’m signing up for 5k races for fun. I’ve got gym class tonight and honest to God I’m excited to go, every time.
The weight loss is 80% due to the Zone Diet. My gym recommended it. I tried it, and I love it. It’s balanced protein/carb/fat. You’ll need to count grams of each for each meal, but not worry about calories. Conversion to that diet has been easy for me, since I don’t feel deprived. The hardest part was, for me, breaking the emotional connection I had to eating, especially overeating. It can be a fiddly diet for some. But try a $10 book and see where you get.
I don’t have time to sing all the praises of Crossfit here. But I can say no more than the fact that I actually miss going to the gym on the days that I don’t have class. I’m still just a beginner, but I can’t get enough. I just upped my class count to 3x a week, plus a 5k run I do every weekend.
For some reason, something clicked for me, and I was able to just DO all these changes. My wife and I think it might be my mid-life crisis. :)
Whatever you do, do something. Make a change and see how it goes.
Congrats Kevin.
I am amazed at how much my undertaking of working out 3 months ago has benefited me in multiple facets of my life. Anyone making this kind of change in their life voluntarily should get a pat on the back…or ruffled hair depending on their age relative to mine.