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Thread: Diet and exercise

  1. #11
    Senior Member Ultralight's Avatar
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    I have been working on this new habit: I eat a LOT of veggies first thing in the morning. At that point in the day I have lots of willpower!

    So I literally might eat 2 or 3 cups of steamed veggies.

  2. #12
    Williamsmith
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    Exercise is important to me for the health of my heart and my back but my experience is that it doesn’t necessarily translate into reduced weight. There are two reasons for it in my opinion. First, exercise causes your natural instinct to consume more food...you get hungry as a result of exercise. Second, muscle mass is heavier than fat. I see evidence of this at the gym every morning. Many come in and do a rigorous workout...an hour or two on average but they never lose weight. It must be frustrating for them to get on the scale or look in the mirror repeatedly and not see any progress. No doubt their cardiovascular system is healthier but you can’t visualize that.

    Diet is key to my weight loss. When I eat sugar and carbs...I get heavier. When I eat after six in the evening...I am heavier. When I buy and eat processed foods laden with Monosodiumglutamate.....MSG....I fatten like all get out.

    So for me...Diet is king. A daily schedule of fasting for up to 12 hours has been the most effective method of weight loss and maintenance.

  3. #13
    Senior Member JaneV2.0's Avatar
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    Fasting is much easier when you eat few carbohydrates, and/or are fat-adapted--and it encourages autophagy, a process involved with cell cleanup and renewal.

  4. #14
    Senior Member SteveinMN's Avatar
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    Over the past 15 months I have lost just short of 50 pounds going low-carb/ultra-low-carb and moving some every day. Some days the exercise is just housework and walking the dog; some days the exercise is slinging boxes at Second Harvest or yard work or shoveling snow. DW and I also go out folk-dancing maybe half-a-dozen times a month. Moving just after a meal seems to make a huge difference for me, so I make that effort.

    Whenever I see charts showing how many calories one can burn in an hour of a given activity, the calories burned are paltry in comparison to the 2000 calories (give or take a couple hundred) that most of us ingest daily, even on a diet. Exercise exists to increase one's metabolism and muscle mass (the heart is a muscle). Few of us have the time or energy to exercise hard enough and long enough to make a serious dent in dietary intake. So, yeah, for me, it's mostly diet, though the exercise has many positive side benefits.
    Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington

  5. #15
    Senior Member JaneV2.0's Avatar
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    Calories are a poor measure of anything. Sam Feltham did an experiment wherein he followed several food plans and ate an isocaloric intake of about 5000 calories daily--the differences in his body's response varied widely. Recent research shows more and more that weight is influenced by hormones, generally centering on insulin, with glucagon, leptin, and ghrelin playing supporting roles.

  6. #16
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    I wonder if fasting is easier if you are not a vegetarian.

    i eat when I am hungry. Generally small meals and snacks. Or all snacks. Except school days. School days I eat at lunch time, when I am usually either starving (because I didn’t eat breakfast) or not hungry yet but I know I won’t make it to 3:30. I also usually try to eat breakfast so that second period won’t hate me.

    i can “see” my cardiovascular health when I go up and down the stairs at school.

    also, I am currently dealing wit( pain in both hips and knees, which I know could be banished with swimming and weight loss.

    i ate my toast for breakfast, and salad (plants, balsamic vinegar, and a sprinkle of nuts) and a piece of bread for lunch.

  7. #17
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    Exercise won't be a miracle loss of massive weight perhaps. However like I said I lost weight, maybe 8 pounds or so (based on a scale give or take for fluctuations) in maybe 6 months WITHOUT TRYING via exercise and got more toned looking as well, and there is no way I could have stuck to almost any diet that long (ha I'd be lucky if I didn't fall off it in 2 weeks, I only have in the past not fallen off the wagon so fast when I thought some diet or other was the be all or end all for *health* not *weight* and well I'm not really convinced there is some universal be all and end all diet now, merely generally more and less healthy eating patterns is all). But I stuck with exercise! So which works better for me not in someone's math equations, but in reality, given I'm not all that disciplined at dieting but lose weight just lifting a few times a week: exercise hands down, simply no contest.

    Fasting, I suspect it is easier for men (but I haven't been both a woman and a man and so I cant' measure the subjective experience there , it's just an impression I get). 12 hours is just taking a break from eating at night, I wouldn't even call it fasting, sometimes I do, sometimes I don't I guess. But is fasting hard or easy? I suspect it's never super easy, I haven't fasted while working except when I have had very easy mindless no stress or pressure jobs (wow I wish I had that now, I gave that up for ambition, stupid me). But otherwise fasting while working is too demanding. But if I can take the day off just to fast - it's neither super hard nor super easy, it kind of like meditation (and it is like meditation an ascetic practice) it just is, kind of like exercise too, is it hard or easy, well if you challenge yourself some and yet not overwhelmingly you might prefer to be elsewhere, but it just is, the hunger comes the hunger goes, like the breath. Do I prefer eating to fasting? Of course! Am I supposed to not be an animal who sees food when hungry and wants to eat it? I think that one has that has been wired in by millions of years of evolution. But it is a health maintenance practice, that one can choose to do or not, it's not particularly useful for weight loss unless doing an awful lot of it.
    Last edited by ApatheticNoMore; 12-1-17 at 2:43pm.
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  8. #18
    Senior Member SiouzQ.'s Avatar
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    Well, it's taken me 16 months to rise up to the what I weighed just prior to the Wholefoods job. I stepped on the scale today and was SHOCKED to see 169 lb! The days of eating whatever I like whenever I like are long over, as my job in the gallery is totally sedentary compared to the deli counter position. So I have gained ten+ pounds here in New Mexico and it is not hard to figure out why. #1 culprit is the drinking culture in this town, of which I partake in. All those empty calories, but when the social life in a tiny town takes place in the tavern...

    The other problem is since I live in the back of the gallery, I never leave home all day long and the kitchen/refrigerator are always there, mocking me. The fact that the general store is 117 steps from my door when I get a junk food attack is a problem. That grocery shopping is harder, and keeping fresh veggies is harder when you have to drive 30 miles to a grocery store is a problem.

    The other BIG problem is lack of exercise due to the torn meniscus problem I had all summer, thereby preventing me from hiking. I have experienced a little setback in my recovery when I twisted my knee walking up the road two weeks after the surgery going, guess where, the BAR...so I have the pain and swelling again. The doctor said I was doing way too much for now and the knee is a bit inflamed, so I am back to taking it easy and icing a lot.

    I miss being able to go to the gym; it is not a very convenient option when you live way out in the country but I am going to look into the community center gym in Santa Fe after the holidays when I have more free time. I have no bike (not that there are really any places to ride) and my living quarters are too small to have any exercise equipment. And I still can't participate in the yoga and dance classes that are offered at the yoga studio three miles away because of my healing knee.

    I have basically allowed a lot of bad habits to creep back into my life and need to take personal responsibility about them in order to turn the tide of weight during menopause. The flip side I guess is a actually have a rear end now and have become a bit busty compared to the lean and skinny me running around a grocery store.

    Yep, I need help, encouragement and motivation to turn this tide...

  9. #19
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    SiouzQ, because you posted your weight, I am now curious how tall you are. Or maybe we have a different frame structure/distribution, because I am 5’8” and at 169, i’d have enough butt for a hippo. Maybe just a small hippo, but at 153 my curves throw off my posture, which is part of the hip pain.

    i was good today, but i’m having a drink with dh while my vegetable based (with some butter and rice) dinner finishes cooking.

  10. #20
    Senior Member SiouzQ.'s Avatar
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    I am 5'9" with long limbs. At my lowest during the Wholefoods years I got down to 150 lbs. My friends feared I was becoming anorexic, but really I was just running my a** off (which made it skinny) so I am actually a *little* glad I have somewhat of a butt for once. The thing I dislike is the weight around my middle, just above the hips, which creates the dreaded muffin-top effect.

    I would like my goal weight to be between 155 and 160 lbs.

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