Weight Loss

Ooo… insightful!

My point is, that it’s a fucking logical given that if you go off a diet and eat the way you did before, you gain it back and perhaps even more. SHOCKING revelation. Just fucking SHOCKING. You should be the next Dr. Phil.

As with EVERYTHING, if you’re going to make a change, the change has to be permanent. Please find me one “change” that goes back to its original state yet is still considered a “change”.[/quote]

Semantics won’t save you now, Rebel Scum.

Honestly, after drinking water almost exclusively as a beverage for the past three weeks, I find diet sodas to be almost too sweet. Given the choice, I’ll take water over diet soda nowadays. This development alone is incredibly eye-opening to me, as I was a Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew fiend before I started the diet. Now I find water my preferred beverage 95% of the time. The other 5% I have an incredible juice jonesing - orange, apple, grape - basically any type of fruit juice.

That’s where I so need to get. I’m a freakin’ Diet Coke addict – gotta have it every day.

I want to kick soft drinks before my son gets really aware of things… I think all the Coke I drank as a kid contributed to my weight problems. And I don’t want him drinking aspartame either…

(Not going to absolutely forbid it, but won’t keep it around the house.)

Iced tea without sugar? No wonder we call you Yankees. Hell, even my wife’s diabetic Grandma puts something (Equal, I think) into it. Tea without sugar is a contrediction in terms.

Differentiate a function then integrate it back to the original. Well, it isn’t quite the original.

I was on a veggie-and-fruit-only thing for about a year. Felt much better, never got sick, no headaches, etc. Also I was off soda for about two years (diet soda, I never drink regular it makes me physically ill). I fell off that horse about six months ago. Sitting here right now, I can honestly say that I have not had anything to drink AT ALL over the last month or so except diet coke and coffee. No water, no tea, no juice. Wow!

When I quit smoking, I ballooned up to 285 pounds (I’m 6’5"). I started the Body-For-Life program and after 8 months dropped down to 235. That may not sound like a lot, but my body fat percentage dropped to 12 percent. Yeah, I’m “ripped.”

The point is that “losing weight” is kind of a misnomer. It should be called “losing fat.” If you lift weights and eat right (small meals, balanced carbs and protein) you’re going to burn fat and gain lean muscle mass.

Eww. How do you brush your teeth with Coke?

Eww. How do you brush your teeth with Coke?[/quote]
“Drink” != “enter mouth”. You don’t drink your toothpaste either, ass.

Anyways, post-post I really truly realized how BAD that soda only thing has become for me and am sucking down an iced tea right now instead. Yay!

So how far are you into weightlifting? Stuart McRobert who is usually right about these things says that you can’t simultaneously lose fat and gain muscle once you’re past the beginner stage. You’d have to be a genetic freak or take drugs to do that. He specifically recommends alternating muscle-gaining periods (where you also inevitably gain some fat) with fat-losing periods (where you also inevitably lose some muscle). It’s the only way to gain muscle while keeping your body fat low.

I’m not an advanced bodybuilder myself but so far, he seems to be right. When I eat enough to gain muscle and ramp up weights, I’m also gaining some fat. When I eat little and try to lose some excess fat, I’m not making any progress in weightlifting. If you can do both things simultaneously you should probably count yourself lucky.

I’ve been doing it for about a year. I’m unfamiliar with McRobert’s work, but I’ll definitely give him a look.

That’s not correct – maybe it doesn’t work as well as alternating in the manner McRobert suggests (I’m also not familiar with his work), but I’ve lost fat and gained muscle over the years solely through lifting weights, occasionally with dramatic results.

Last year, for instance, to prepare for my wedding (on a beach!) I lifted weights almost every day for 4 months, and I went from a 36" waist to a 31" waist, and I gained a ton of muscle during that period. The bottom line to weight loss is as long as you’re expending more calories than you’re taking in (and weight-lifting burns a lot of calories), you’ll lose weight. As long as you keep up your protein intake during that period, you’ll also gain muscle. You have to continue to eat a lot of protein if you’re weight-lifting and dieting, or you will lose muscle.

In terms of dieting, the rules are simple:

  1. drastically limit your intake of carbohydrates especially (no pasta, limited breads, choose wild rice over white rice, etc.), except those in fruit/vegetables;

  2. limit your fat intake (although some fat is o.k., and certainly better than carbohydrates, which many people don’t seem to realize) – don’t eat any fried food ever, limited cheese and non-skim dairy products.

  3. Eat at least one significant portion of lean protein daily (turkey breast, boneless, skinless chicken, fish) and lots of fruits and vegetables.

  4. Drink tons of water – at least 8 glasses a day. Don’t drink any non-diet pop, ever – as others have stated, it’s one of the worst sources of calories. When drinking alcholol, avoid sweet drinks or drinks with Pop in them (other than tonic or soda water), try to drink lighter beer unless you can’t stand it.

  5. Get decent amounts of sleep, and don’t eat anything at least 3 hours before sleeping.

  6. Try to do at least some moderate exercise – if you’re really in bad shape or hate exercising, a brisk walk for an hour three times at week is certainly adequate (just do it first thing when you wake up Saturday/Sunday, and then allocate one day after work during the week to do the third one). Walking is actually much better than some alternatives, like exercise bikes. Whatever you do, choose a pace that you can eventually sustain for at least 30 minutes. Don’t get dejected when you start if you have to frequently stop - just track your goals and work your way to lengthier sessions.

  7. If you want to just lose weight for health and to feel better, cool. If you want to actually lose weight and look good, you need to shape your body through weight-lifting. It’s never to late to start, and your strength will continue to increase until you’re into your 50s. If you’re really out of shape, you’re better off increasing your cardiovascular fitness first, through walking/stair-climing/running/swimming.

At least 8 glasses of water? Didn’t that turn out to be an urban legend?

Why are the carbohydrates in fruits and vegetables supposedly good for you?

Well, if you lift weights so excessively then you’re certainly going to burn a lot of calories and lose fat accordingly. But being able to gain muscles by weightlifting every day for 4 months would seem to indicate that you were either totally untrained when you started, or you’re the genetic exception, a so-called “easy gainer”. (Steroids would also enable you to do this but I don’t assume you’re taking any?)

I haven’t tried this systematically but whenever I dabbled in light but frequent exercise, I never got any results beyond the initial increase of muscle tone. I only got results once I switched to HIT and lifted only twice a week but nearly to the point of muscular failure. That’s also what Arthur Jones and Stuart McRobert have observed and recommended. (Hard but frequent exercise is physically impossible, at least according to my definition of “hard” which involves bad muscle soreness on the day following a workout.)

Here’s McRobert’s Hardgainer website, by the way – don’t be shocked, it looks like some snake-oil salesman but that’s just because McRobert has no taste whatsoever! His books are extremely detailed, insightful, and accurate wherever I could compare them to personal experience. Here’s his take on conventional bodybuilding which would probably also cover your method.

Arthur Jones was the inventor of high-intensity training (HIT), and he’s written two bulletins that started the whole thing: Bulletin 1 and Bulletin 2.

Well, and there’s also Cleve Blakemore but we won’t go there. :)

If only we could all lift minivans with one hand. And had titanium skeletons. And black heritage.

At least 8 glasses of water? Didn’t that turn out to be an urban legend?

Maybe for health reasons, but for dieting, it is a good thing to do since drinking massive amounts of water is an appetite suppressant. People who drink diet coke are missing the point why we’re recommending it: water helps keep you from snacking.

I think if I am going to keep weight off, I’m going to have to live as a hermit in a cave in the mountains from Thanksgiving to New Year’s, because I cannot withstand all the tasty holiday treats. I did pretty well over Thanksgiving, since we went to my mother-in-law’s where the food was not as great a temptation :P , but by Christmas I wasn’t doing so well. The combination of holiday stress and ready availability of cookies, brownies, candy, and nuts was too much to resist and I munched a lot more than I wanted to.

Until then I had been slowly and steadily losing fat by a combination of weight training, rowing, and portion control. I didn’t really change the makeup of what I ate, just tried to eat a bit less than my stomach thought I should, especially in the evening. My opinion is that weight training is the best exercise for weight loss, because it provides multiple benefits: First, the exercise itself burns calories, but more importantly, it accelerates your metabolism for at least several hours afterward, which increases your caloric consumption. Second, working the muscles to complete failure releases hormones into your system that tell your body to build up your muscle mass, which protects you from muscle loss due to dieting, and force your body to rely more on stored fat.

For me, the physical demands of a weight-loss and/or exercise regimen pale in comparison to the psychological demands. The hardest things for me to do are to motivate myself to work out, and to abstain from snacking when I am unhappy or tired. So, mental tricks are very important for success, like the brushing your teeth in the early evening trick. Refraining from eating before bed is a good policy not just because extra calories eaten right before sleeping are more likely to turn to fat, but also because under-eating before bed lets you sleep through 8 hours of hunger pangs and wake up with your stomach shrunken and “reset” to be satisfied by a normal breakfast. This is much more productive for me than if I try to skimp on lunch or breakfast, which makes me over-eat at the next meal. If I absolutely am famished to the point where hunger pains are keeping me from falling asleep, I’ll eat enough raw veggies to fill me up, so that my stomach stops rumbling long enough for me to fall asleep and I am asleep by the time it realizes it was tricked with stuff that take just as many calories to digest as it provides. On nights like this I find I often dream about eating, but dream-food doesn’t count, unless you are in the castle of Morpheus.

I found this excerpt from the Bulletin 1 above funny, because I have experienced it:

Watching a man working out properly is almost frightening - and it is frightening to some people; the intensity of effort is so great that the subject’s entire body is shaking, his face will turn dark red - or even purple - and both breathing and heart action will be increased at least one-hundred percent, and frequently far more than that.

There is a middle-aged guy at the sports complex where I lift weights who is definitely a subscriber to this method. I call him “Orgasm Man” because at the end of every set he sounds like he is popping a nut, seriously. It’s quite distracting, but more power to him, I guess.

Also, the “myth” of 8 glasses of water a day applies to the average person who doesn’t engage in intense physical exercise on a frequesnt basis. Those who do will definitely need to consume a lot more water.

Why are the carbohydrates in fruits and vegetables supposedly good for you?[/quote]

They’re simple carbohydrates, not complex, so they’re easy for your body to break down, and they also contain a great deal of vitamins and other nutrients. It’s not a great idea to completely exclude any group.

I’m not sure why you consider that the only interpretation. Most of my muscle gain was just the result of regaining muscle I used to have, which is always easier to acquire than muscle/strength you didn’t previously possess. That said, by the end of that span I was stronger than I ever have been, so I definitely gained new muscle as well.

To be totally honest, I think Arnold’s books on weight-training are excellent. The biggest problem with training regularly is giving your body time to recover (and as you get older, your body needs additional time to recover from an intense work out). Steroids are incredibly effective, but what they do primarily is increase muscle recovery time, and accordingly allow you to work out harder and more intensely than you otherwise could (and sustain more muscle mass than your frame would normally accommodate).

I’ve always worked out on a three-day system, working out different muscle groups on each day (chest/legs; biceps/triceps/forearms; back/shoulders), with abdominals and some cardio each day – gives your muscle groups adequate time to recover since you’re not directly working them more than once every three days. When I stick with my system consistently, I can get in pretty amazing shape in under a month. Again, that’s probably easier because I’m largely just regaining prior form, but anyone can lose a lot of weight and acquire a great deal of muscle mass by sticking with that program.

Like I indicated in a prior post, if you’re really out of shape and haven’t done much, or any, physical exercise for years, you’re much better off initially sticking with cardiovascular exercises for a couple of months (even walking) before hitting the weight room. But I’m a pretty devoted fan of free weights.