why cant i lose weight ???

No A reasonable sized baked potato (fist sized) is around 225-250 kcal. If you are interested, then weigh them before cooking, they are 70 kcal/100g.

Stick half a tin of light baked beans on (150) and you have a good meal. Add some fruit for desert and you are away.

I’m moderately skinny (63 kg ish) and my one piece of advice:

There’s nothing wrong with feeling hungry. It won’t kill you.

All these diets that say fill up on water or fibre of leafy greens or whatever, that’s all well and good but sooner or later you’re going to start filling up on calorie-dense foods again and the weight will pile back on.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling hungry. It won’t kill you.

It kills me, I end up going dizzy and apart from anything else I get massive headaches and an inability to concentrate. Its not hunger, its lack of energy – I get the same thing when I’ve ridden a long ride and not consumed enough calories. My problem is I dont start losing weight until I drop calorie intake to <750 cals a day, at which point my body is starting to have serious disagreements with me!

I agree with the get used to feeling hungry idea. About 10 years ago I was about a stone and a half heavier than I am now. I lost it very quickly by just eating less food.

I looked at what I was eating and realised that the portions were huge so I cut them down to about 2/3s. Yes I was hungry for a few weeks, but being hungry is ok really.

I’d go with that finbar, you have to accept that during a fat loss programme, from time to time you are going to get a bit peckish….

t kills me, I end up going dizzy and apart from anything else I get massive headaches and an inability to concentrate. Its not hunger, its lack of energy – I get the same thing when I’ve ridden a long ride and not consumed enough calories. My problem is I dont start losing weight until I drop calorie intake to <750 cals a day, at which point my body is starting to have serious disagreements with me!

That’s not hunger, that’s your blood sugar crashing.

If you can’t lose weight on more than 750 cals your either counting them wrong or a paraplegic.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling hungry. It won’t kill you.

I watched a TV programme once about a Pacific island where they have the best life expectancy in the world. I think it was Okinawa – somewhere Japanese anyway. They had a saying on the island that you should only eat until you are 80% full and this habit, as well as what they were eating, was thought to be partly responsible for their good health.

I try not to eat anything at all after 8pm (based on nothing more than something Matt Chester[/url] put on his blog once), but I always feel loads better when I stick to this. I think your body needs some down time to properly process what you’ve eaten through the day, or maybe it was just down to sleeping better because my body wasn’t working to digest food in my sleep. Most of what I would eat after 8 was pretty crappy, so just cutting that out could have made a big difference to how i felt on its own.

I don’t get home until 7.30 -> 8pm so that would make my last meal at 12.00 / 12.15, which I reckon would kill me (or at least make me want to kill somebody)

That’s not hunger, that’s your blood sugar crashing.

Hmm interesting point, but it’s only that that makes me feel hungry – i dont generally feel "hungry" at all.

If you can’t lose weight on more than 750 cals your either counting them wrong or a paraplegic.

Defintely not counting them wrong. Definitely not paraplegic! I filled in one of the many online base metabolic rate calculators and it suggested I was burning about 3000 cals just in normal daily life. I thought this was probably a bit high and 2000 might be a better option, so I’d start trying with 1500 a day, which did nothing. So I pared it down and down over a few weeks.

Its lunchtime now and I’m not "hungry", just have developed a headache. And no im not diabetic. I feel like I’m on a low-carb diet all the time!

Sorry for hijacking a little but I was simply pointing out that the OP is not alone!

Coffeeking, that looks like a pretty unhealthy diet. Forgetting about calories, you’re not getting anywhere near enough fresh fruit and veg each day and not eating anything for breakfast isn’t the best way to start the day.

To get back to calories, a pound of fat is 3500 kcal so you must have taken in 7000 calories more than you burned to put on 2lbs*. That’s only 170 calories a day, which is a pint of beer a day or a just over half a Snickers per day.

* assuming the extra weight was all fat. It could be water or muscle – I’m 1.5 stone heavier now than I was 10 years ago, but no fatter.

I work shifts so the 8 o’clock rule goes out of the window, surely this works on a basis of last meal xx hours before bed? Does 2-3 hours sound reasonable?

Coffeking, what did you do to your exercise regime over that time? It strikes me that you will have triggered your bodies starvation response with such a low calorie diet, which will not help.

You need to counter this with increased exercise (possibly incluiding some resistance exercise) or your metabolism can slow to match your intake and additional calories (from a drinking session say) will be more readily stored as fat.

Also if you go to low, you risk loosing lean body mass, which is not what most people are trying to achieve. Especially if you then put the weight back on again, which will be fat. So you end up with the same or more body mass but with an increase fat %.

Mike, plenty of veg – the stir fry is essentially a few cubes of chicken with a large plate mounded high with a wide variety of veg that is only lightly fried so still crispy and almost raw (its half a family sized bag of fresh mixed veg). I’ve never had breakfasts since I was about 12, eating that early in the morning makes me feel ill apart from anything!
These days I dont eat brekky because if I do I have to eat something else before (and as well as) lunch in order not to get a headaches – it makes me ravenous for the whole day. I know the argument is that if you start yourself off like that you keep burning cals more through the day, but I also then have to eat more cals or i’m ill!

If I exercise more (which im not doign any of at the moment!) I fire up into full blown eating monster mode and I can more than double my calorie intake. I was commuting 40 miles a day, 3 days a week for several months a while back and consuming over 4000 cals a day and not changing weight lol. But at the moment I have no time to exercise.

Related to feeling hungry – sometimes it is dehydration – I can’t remember who told me that but it works for me.

When you are dieting keep your fluid intake (not alcohol) up way higher, at least 2 litres of water a day, and 500 mls per hour of you are exercising in summer.

If you feel hungry drink some water first that often solves it and fills you up a bit with food.

RudeBoy – why thank you. I used to smoke loads as well. All good now !

I dropped 2 stone by cutting out the crap at work and only eating when I was hungry (not to be confused with ‘peckish’). My downfall is McVities plain choccy digestives, dam them all and their loveliness!!!!
Starving yourself and too much gym will put you in starve mode which might increase your body weight. Don’t cut out anything you don’t like, just cut down. Don’t eat until you’re full to burst and don’t eat after 8pm. Make dinner your biggest meal so as you’ve burnt most of it off by bedtime.
It’s taken time to get that big, expect it to take time to lose it.
Aim for no more than a couple of pounds a week and don’t worry if you don’t, it’s just your body catching up.

My other huggggggggge tip is, avoid sweetners and diet drinks like the plague, have sugar instead. Sweetners like aspartame are 100x sweeter than sugar. Your lardy arse will get confused inside and absorb fat to compensate for the increased blood acidicity it thinks it’s about to get.

Starving yourself and too much gym will put you in starve mode which might increase your body weight.

This is a misunderstanding, you still cant gain weight if you’re using more cals than eating – starvation mode simply means the body is more likely to store any excesses as fat, faster.

From what we have worked out above, I dont get "hungry" – i simply run out of energy and get blood sugar problems first, and I dont get full – I can happily eat 3 xmas dinners in 2 hours.

Never used sweeteners, hate the things – yacky creations that taste nothing like sugar and are linked to brain problems.

Some fair points in general though.

Mike, plenty of veg – the stir fry is essentially a few cubes of chicken with a large plate mounded high with a wide variety of veg that is only lightly fried so still crispy and almost raw (its half a family sized bag of fresh mixed veg).

Ah, I read your ‘menu’ as though it was just stir-fried chicken (no veg) with the bag of salad.

There’s some doubt about the nutritional value of those bags of salad. The bags are often full of an inert gas to stop the salad going brown and wilted but the nutrients still degrade, so you’re getting less vitamins than fresh stuff.

This is a misunderstanding, you still cant gain weight if you’re using more cals than eating – starvation mode simply means the body is more likely to store any excesses as fat, faster.

Does the body not start to break down muscle for energy too? If it does that, your basal metabolic rate will drop as muscle burns calories all the time but fat doesn’t.

There’s some doubt about the nutritional value of those bags of salad. The bags are often full of an inert gas to stop the salad going brown and wilted but the nutrients still degrade, so you’re getting less vitamins than fresh stuff.

They’re still only a day or so old, so its just the same as buying fresh veg and chopping it yourself?

Does the body not start to break down muscle for energy too? If it does that, your basal metabolic rate will drop as muscle burns calories all the time but fat doesn’t.

It does indeed but im fairly sure thats when you’re in full swing of exercise, having depleated all your carbs AND working so hard you arent able to break down fat fast enough. Fat stores would be a useless survival feature if we switched to burning muscle before fat stores when the body is stressed 🙂

They’re still only a day or so old, so its just the same as buying fresh veg and chopping it yourself?

I’ve not seen anything about the veg bags, but the veg could have been picked 6 months ago and kept chilled for ages.

Does the body not start to break down muscle for energy too? If it does that, your basal metabolic rate will drop as muscle burns calories all the time but fat doesn’t.

You’re correct. Shouldn’t be a real world concern unless you starve yourself.

It really is as simple as eating basic unprocessed foods only. If you just eat recognisable chunks of animals and plants it’s very hard to go wrong.

Dont know if someone posted already but with weights lower weight higher repetetions.
so if you push 40kg 2 x10 reps
lower it to 30kg 2x15reps

It really is as simple as eating basic unprocessed foods only. If you just eat recognisable chunks of animals and plants it’s very hard to go wrong.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

(The linked article explains what food is and how much is not too much.)

I was hoping the poster who lived off 1000kcals would come back to explain how he managed it.

Probably too weak to type tho i guess.

Hi mate,
First – losing weight wont help you pass the beep test. As others have said you can be fat and fit, in exactly the same way you can be skinny and unfit. Your primary goal should be improving your cardiovascular fitness – at the same time you should start making an effort to improve your strength and muscular endurance. There are almost limitless cheap and easy ways you can improve your fitness, no point trying to list them all, I dont know anything about you, your free time, how much space you have around you, what type of exercise you like….. but by way of an example – I find that simple circuits work well.

eg. See how many of the follwing you can do in a minute – Press ups. Sit ups. Leg lifts. Star Jumps. Squat lunges.

Repeat the circuit 5 times, trying to maintain your original pace. You’ll find your fitness rapidly if you do that every day, when you can get in the region of 50 per minute and maintain that you can consider yourself reasonably fit. For extra metabolic kick do it first thing in the morning before breakfast and in the evening before walking the dog – which you could be jogging too. Keep in mind too that fit to cycle is not the same as fit to run etc – each exercise requires different muscle groups. To pass the beep test you’ll need to run. When your walking the dog, jog at a moderate pace. Increase your pace for 30 seconds every 5 minutes. Increase the frequency and intensity as you get fitter – be careful not to kill yourself.

With specific regard to weightloss – For your height you would appear to be overweight, unless your very very muscular. 13 – 15 stone would be a more normal weight for a 6 footer depending on muscularity. If you are serious about losing weight you need to educate yourself about diet, metabolism, exercise, your body in general and how it processes food, burns fat and builds muscle. If you dont do this any diet you go on will just be an arbitrary set of rules you dont fully understand and can pick up or drop willy nilly. For an example of why you need to educate yourself just ask a woman, any woman about dieting. Their long list of half baked efforts and failures should back this up pretty well.

I’ll give you a head start though – the key to weight loss is understanding your metabolism. It needs to be stimulated to burn fat. There are two ways of doing this – eating and exercise. To summarise massively – Eat small meals more frequently. Small meals stimulate your metabolism, burning fat. Large meals slow it down.

Short intense resistance exercises ie weightlifting. Intense weightlifting sessions (not massively heavy, not stupidly light) will stimulate your muscles and kick start your metabolism. If you combine this with correct diet your muscle mass will grow slightly then plateau. Muscles burn fat – more muscle = more fat burned.

Long endurance cardiovascular exercises can easily deplete muscle mass making it harder to burn fat, making it harder to loose weight.

Your calorie intake should be the same as / slightly below the average for your height and build. If you consumed for example 1000 calories a day (as posted above) your body would essentially shut down and go into starvation mode. Your metabolism would slow massively and your system would hoard fat, you’d also start to burn muscle leading to a vicious circle – one that most women get caught in.

So basically, do your homework. Ignore most peoples half baked theories and figure it out for yourself – there is a hell of a lot to learn. My only other piece of advice – if possible join a judo/ jujitsu/ mma club, anything where people practice full contact combat sports preferably grappling based and stick at it. They’ll fix you. They can fix everything.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

(The linked article explains what food is and how much is not too much.)
12 page article!? You don’t need 12 pages. If you can recognise it as a plant or animal. Eat it.

That’s much less than 12 pages.

I was hoping the poster who lived off 1000kcals would come back to explain how he managed it.

Probably too weak to type tho i guess.

I lived off around 1000 for 6 weeks with no probs but no weight loss(as mentioned a few posts ago). Yes I’m sure of the calories, but even given a 25% error margin for portion sizes that’s still not very much – you’d expect to be losing weight lol. Of course some people would tell you that you’d going to slip into this magical starvation mode, but obviously the obese patients taken in to hospital to lose weight who are fed 750 cals a day and shed serious pounds per week haven’t heard of this 🙂 I dont doubt it exists, but I believe rarely affects normal people doing normal levels of exercise.

The folk on here who say things about living of 1000 calories a day are very foolish if true. You are damaging your body and are putting your body into starvation mode. No reputable dietician would recommend that. Its a crash or starvation diet and makes future weight gain more likely.

Not really TJ, its not really any less than i was eating without thinking about it – i.e. I just added up what i ate naturally and saw it was about 1200ish.

The idea that yo-yo and starvation type diets increase ones likelyhood of gaining weight later are out-dated and proven wrong. I’ll try to find the link, but it doesnt alter your bodies function at all, its a purely mental problem.

Coffeking – as far as I am aware that is not the consensus in the medical profession and certainly is not what I was taught.

Accepted wisdom ( which is not always right of course) is that starvation diets do more harm than good.

Unless you are completely bone idol and a midget – 1000 calories a day for a man is a bad idea. That’s basically a starvation diet, proven not to work and not healthy in the long term. You’re also much more prone to to cheat, snack and binge on such a diet, it’ll also leave you low on energy, lethargic, depressed, prone to mood swings and generally a pain to be around.

I wouldnt even use the word diet to describe that, its fasting or starving. A diet should be clean healthy foods which meat your calorific requirements.

Starving for long periods can cause issues, and switching types of diet all the time can cause gall bladder problems apparently, but none affect your metabolising of food specifically.

Weight loss resources (.co.uk) recommends:

As a general rule though, most nutrition experts recommend never going below 1,000-1,200 calories a day if you’re dieting on your own

Will yo-yo dieting have damaged my metabolism permanently?
Fortunately not! The idea that yo-yo dieting permanently lowers your metabolism has been relegated to the archives. However, if you’ve frequently crash dieted and severely restricted your calorie intake without exercising, it’s likely you’ll have a lot less muscle now compared with the very first time you dieted.

The latter I can confirm. Which is why im now stopping the 1000 cals a day diet lol. As I said, I’ve found I havent changed weight at all on 1000 cals a day, all I’ve found is Im more prone to headaches and more prone to oversleeping. A bit pointless really. But I never specifically "went on" a 1000 cal diet, I just was eating very little else anyway so it seemed the natural option to lop a few more cals off and see if it worked. It didnt.

" Ten weight-loss myths

So much is said about losing weight that it can be hard to sort truth from fiction. Here’s the truth about weight-loss myths.

1. Starving myself is the best way to lose weight
Crash diets are unlikely to result in long-term weight loss. In fact, they can sometimes lead to longer term weight gain. The main problem is that this type of diet is too hard to maintain. Your body will be low on energy, causing you to crave high-fat and high-sugar foods. When you finally give in and eat those foods, you will often eat more calories than you need, causing weight gain. "

http://www.nhs.uk/LiveWell/loseweight/Pages/Loseweighthome.aspx

"Research clearly shows that crash diets don’t work.

This is because by drastically reducing your calorie intake (crash dieting), your actually reducing the rate your body can burn calories. If your aim is to lose weight, then dramatically reducing your intake of energy (produced by food) over a short period of time is not the way to go. "
"People who crash diet tend to put weight back on quicker than those who follow a long-term healthy eating plan. This is because once you’ve stopped your crash diet your slow metabolism will not be able to process the increase in calories. These calories will be stored as fat meaning you end up putting on more weight than when you started."

http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/2468.aspx?CategoryID=51&SubCategoryID=165

Did you really stick to 1000 calories a day? No alcohol at all?

I eat around 3000 – 4000 calories a day and am slightly overweight but not gaining at all. 5’10" and 11st 10lbs

While not disagreeing with your nhs links (not that the NHS is always right I can assure you!), you’re suggesting im crash dieting. I’m not, I’m just eating a little less than I normally do (as I’ve said from the start). My food intake varies MASSIVELY with my exercise level. I’ve bearly exercised for 10+ months, so I use few calories. When I do exercise I eat 4K+ cals and remain static. I actually think my body does a good job of telling me when it needs food.

Yup, I really do – give or take maybe a pint on a friday. the problem is, as would be expected I am very tempted by chocolates and sweet things.

coffeeking –
Starving for long periods can cause issues, and switching types of diet all the time can cause gall bladder problems apparently, but none affect your metabolising of food specifically.

Weight loss resources (.co.uk) recommends:

As a general rule though, most nutrition experts recommend never going below 1,000-1,200 calories a day if you’re dieting on your own
Will yo-yo dieting have damaged my metabolism permanently?
Fortunately not! The idea that yo-yo dieting permanently lowers your metabolism has been relegated to the archives. However, if you’ve frequently crash dieted and severely restricted your calorie intake without exercising, it’s likely you’ll have a lot less muscle now compared with the very first time you dieted.
The latter I can confirm. Which is why im now stopping the 1000 cals a day diet lol.

It doesnt directly effect your metabolism – it reduces your muscle mass. The more muscle you have the more calories you can burn. Starvation = muscle loss = lowered ability to metabolise fat.

One myth is that your metabolism slows down as you get older – it doesnt, people just become more sedantary. However we do produce less testosterone as we get older, making it more difficult to build and maintain muscle soooo…..the long term effects of starvation diets can basically be a viscous circle.

Starvation = muscle loss = lowered ability to metabolise fat

Obviously, im not disagreeing, though if you’re going a LOT lower than normal in theory you would reach a stage of low fat and low muscle, then be able to re-gain muscle by only eating the correct amount to build it, rather than the extra you were eating to get fat. At the point of eating muscle you’d also be eating fat – you wouldnt still be gaining weight (which I am)!

However we do produce less testosterone as we get older, making it more difficult to build and maintain muscle soooo…..the long term effects of starvation diets can basically be a viscous circle.

Actually I read the other day that that starts at about 35?

Correct that the NHS is not always right and advice such as that is often behind the times.

I have to say I simply do not believe 1000 calories a day. A pint is a couple of hundred or more depending on type.

Most men on a thousand calories a day would be unable to function at all.

I have to say I simply do not believe 1000 calories a day.

To be honest, and not intending to insult, but I dont really care, I’ve been closely monitoring my food for the 6 weeks before xmas for the very purpose of seeing why I was gaining weight, I rarely drink (at MOST a pint a week throughout that period) and I’ve purposefully stopped eating crap and stuck to the menu I described earlier, with all sensible portion sizes, not 40 tons of stir fry etc lol. I’m back on my normal food at the moment so up to about 1200 cals and drinking a few glasses of wine a week, and a bag or two of nuts per week. Like you I’m a cals in=cals out believer, which is why I’m very confused.

Coffeking – – not meaning to be offensive or patronising – sorry if I seem that way. My experience of this is that folk hugely underestimate the amount of calories they consume. Lots of stuff gets forgotten in the caluculations. The fats used in cooking, the odd snack or drink, milk in tea, it all adds up

A few glasses of wine a week and a pint or two- thats a thousand or more calories there – a few bags of nut – ditto.

If you are not loosing weight on 1200 calories a day either you have a very odd metabolism or you are consuming more than that. Your body requires more than a thousand calories a day just to sit still and breathe.