Are you over weight?

General Discussion Forums Life, The Universe and (almost) Everything!
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I have been about 24lbs overweight for a while now and although for three years I have not changed as far as my weight goes.  I am having to reduce my sugar levels and lose weight as I am borderline Diabetic.

Until Monday of last week I was eating one piece of toasted whole meal bread with butter and jam with a coffee (sweetener, no sugar). Lunch was a sandwich with butter and ham with a cup of tea. Evening meal was Meat and vegetable and a drink of water. My weight did not increase but it did not decrease either.

Then on Sunday we had a visit from my sister in law who had lost a lot of weight over two months without any problems at all.

Her method was this.  Breakfast, three dessert spoonful of Scottish Porridge Oats made with half milk and half water, with a cup of coffee. Lunch was a sandwich of Ryvita as normal with a cup of tea. Evening meals are still meat and veg or baked potato and Tuna and Mayonnaise and Chicken or ham.  Mid morning and mid afternoon breaks are just coffee or tea. No eating between meals.

During the day I have been keeping busy doing manual type jobs around the bungalow, repairs etc and polishing my MX5 etc.

Since last Monday I have lost in weight eleven (11) pounds.

I post this as it may help other people who want to try to lose weight too, and I am feeling quite pleased with myself.

 

ps I am still feeling very well and have had no problems while on this simple diet. 

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Well done

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11lbs in how many days? Good grief man.

I am still overweight by around 16lbs.

3 years back aged 63 I was classed as clinically obese and overweight by 56lbs, well on my way to morbid obesity.

I had to obey medical advice and follow, to begin with, a pretty brutal exercise & diet regime.

Note, I say exercise first, as the balance is approximately 70% exercise THEN 30% diet.

It’s working slowly, but the last stone + is proving difficult. 

I know what my issue is…I’m basically lazy, and have allowed one or two “bad habits” to resume. Like…Jacobs Creek & sneaky visits to Costa. 

I am what I eat, so I’ll need to stop and quit kidding myself.

I am perhaps still exceeding my calorie requirements by around…at a guess…400/500 cals per day.

That’s 15,000 cals per month at least or the rough equivalent of 5 Christmas dinners. If you are not burning calories, it will be stored as fat…some sugars & cals are worse than others. 

Once you get to where you need to be, you can easily stay there if you cut out the “dodgy” carbs & sugars. Avoid ALL processed foods like it was poison, because it is. Non process foods need carbs to digest, so the stomach & upper/lower bowels have to work for their living.  Processed foods have the hard work removed, so excess carbs that would have been needed as nature intended, get let off and…turn to fat.

There are no cakes, biscuits, freezer puddings, crisps, or any other processed rubbish in my larder. I cook everything from fresh, I know what goes in, and I freeze in containers.

There are spuds, but NO bread.  Supermarket bread is really chronic toxic stuff. Laden with salt & sugars.

I have pasta, but not the beige rubbish…only wholemeal. Soya spag bog is OK when you get used to it. Minced turkey sauce is really good. Turkey is the lowest fat but animal highest protein available. So is buffalo and ostrich.

The really dangerous fats for us are internal that surround your organs, and belly/back fat which can strain heart, kidney, liver, bladders. They can and do kill on daily basis. 

There are hundreds of Googly things you can read, but personally I’d go the the GP for a bench mark MOT first as I did, and then elect to follow a more agressive exercise and diet program.

Only you can do it.

Good luck.

 

 

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I am pleased to report a 3 stone weight loss in 16 months.

The secret is this…eat less but make sure you eat healthy foods.

Exercise more.

 

 

Because I had not done any real exercise for years I joined a gym and hired a personal trainer. This was important for me to ensure I exercised safely as I have back issues.

I can now do HIIT classes, spin classes, boot camp and all over body workouts. 

I can bench press 100kgs and run 5k in 24 minutes.

I am still overweight and need to lose another 14lbs.

I weight 15 stone.

I am almost 61.

The benefits of exercise and weight loss are enormous.

My BP is now normal (whereas I have always had hypertension).

My cholesterol is 4.7 (whereas it was always above 7)

 

I have lost 7 inches off my waist and 4 inches off my chest.

 

Moobs have turned into pecks.

 

What made me change…I looked in the mirror and was disgusted at what I saw and decided I needed to change whilst I am still capable of such change.

 

My motivation now is… I view a picture of how I used to look and compare it to now. I feel proud and want to make further progress.

 

I thinks its about commitment/effort and self belief.  

 

Well done to everyone who has made a significant change and lost weight. It isn’t easy at my age but a healthy retirement is definitely worth fighting for.

 

 

 

 

 

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I was overweight about this time last year. I now loosely follow an amount of what Michael Pollan

wrote about in his book… ‘In Defense of Food’.

Basically, I started eating less, more healthily, and exercise more. For me, exercise is brisk walking in wooded areas, and the countryside in general.

And using public exercise machines that are in a nearby recreation ground. 

I seldom eat meat. 

The book was an eye opener for me, to realising just how much cr*p is for sale, disguised as food. 

Since last year, I reduced weight by 2 to 3 pounds a month, and am now within the BMI index of healthy weight. 

Not dieting, just living more healthily. 

 

1. Eat food
2. Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food
3. Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry
4. Avoid food products that contain high-fructose corn syrup
5. Avoid food products that have some form of sugar (or sweetener listed among) the top three ingredients
6. Avoid food products that have more than 5 ingredients
7. Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce
8. Avoid food products that make health claims
9. Avoid food products with the wordoid “lite” or the terms “low fat” or “nonfat” in their names
10. Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not
11. Avoid foods you see advertised on television
12. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle
13. Eat only foods that will eventually rot
14. Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature
15. Get out of the supermarket whenever you can
16. Buy your snacks at the farmers market
17. Eat only foods that have been cooked by humans
18. Don’t ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap
19. If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.
20. It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car
21. It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language (Think Big Mac, Cheetos or Pringles)
22. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves
23. Treat meat as a flavoring or special occasion food
24. Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs and other mammals].
25. Eat your colors
26. Drink the spinach water
27. Eat animals that have themselves eaten well
28. If you have space, buy a freezer
29. Eat like an omnivore
30. Eat well-grown food from healthy soil
31. Eat wild foods when you can
32. Don’t overlook the oily little fishes
33. Eat some foods that have been predigested by bacterial or fungi
34. Sweeten and salt your food yourself
35. Eat sweet foods as you find them in nature
36. Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk
37. The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead
38. Favor the kinds of oils and grains that have traditionally been stone-ground
39. Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself
40. Be the kind of person who takes supplements – then skip the supplements
41. Eat more lie the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.
42. Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism
43. Have a glass of wine with dinner
44. Pay more, eat less
45. Eat less
46. Stop eating before you’re full
47. Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored
48. Consult your gut
49. Eat slowly
50. The banquet is in the first bite
51. Spend as much time enjoying the meal as it took to prepare it
52. Buy smaller plates and glasses
53. Serve a proper portion and don’t go back for seconds
54. Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like pauper
55. Eat meals
56. Limit your snacks to unprocessed plant foods
57. Don’t get your fuel from the same place your car does
58. Do all your eating at a table
59. Try not to eat alone
60. Treat treats as treats
61. Leave something on your plate
62. Plant a vegetable garden if you have space, a window box if you don’t
63. Cook
64. Break the rules once in a while
 

 

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My wife and I NEVER use meat in our cottage pies or spag-bols, or any type of similar meal.  We use Quorn, and when mixed up with a home-produced sauce (no processed, shop-bought sauces), apart from feeling ‘cleaner’ on the palate, is practically indistinguishable from fat-laden meat, and a whole lot healthier.

A bolognese sauce is always made using a lightly-softened onion with a tin of tomatoes and some passata, mixed in with a portion of the Quorn - together with some Worcestershire sauce and the appropriate herbs (oregano etc) and fresh basil - lovely !

Another favourite of ours is a similar sauce to that above (but without the Quorn mince), then adding a dash of chilli sauce, which is cooked with either Quorn sausages, or the rather tasty Linda McCartney veggie ones, served on top of a bed of steamed cabbage.  try it - it’s delicious. 

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We bake our own bread, with no added sugar or salt. The bread is delicious.
I’m just 11 stone & measure 5ft 10” it’s a good idea to weigh yourself daily, my scales transmitt the data to my phone and this allows one to keep an accurate record.

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Good Stuff guys - proud of you:-)

It is amazing how we can kid ourselves about appearance, weight, etc but the truth is out there starting with bathroom scales that generally do not lie.

Not overweight but room for improvement having moved to Devon and quit the gym about 7 years ago. A few jokes from the other half about my old man body have resulted in a very dusty York bench being retrieved from the loft a few days ago along with those trusty old plastic york weights. Starting gently with a 40kg bench press and feeling the benefit already.

Weight loss is not rocket science - most of us know when eating/drinking the wrong things to excess and not doing enough exercise.

If you decide to use walking as your exercise regime, be aware that no amount of leisurely walking is useful for the body although very good for the soul. You really need to increase the pace and include hills in the walk to raise blood pressure/heart rate and gently stretch the cardio-vascular system. 

It seems that there is a direct correlation between excess weight and certainly type 2 diabetes. This has become clearer where the assessment and diagnosis of type 2 diabetes has changed, From memory the lowering of diagnostic criteria a few years ago created an addition 1 million diabetics in the UK. Quite simply a lot of people with the right idea have lost weight through diet and exercise and their diabetic status gone. Something to celebrate where a bit of effort in the right area produces the result thoroughly deserved - rather like understanding and looking after an MX5.              

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I’m not over-weight, I’m 10 stones on a 5’ 9" lightweight “utility” frame, but this time last year my cholesterol level gave concern at 7.2 so a change of diet was in order.  Out went full cream milk, cheese, sugar, sweets, cakes, biscuits, red and processed meat products, shell fish etc.  In came semi-skimmed milk, oatmeal, pasta instead of potatoes, more fresh fruit and veg, and things like Quorn, tofu, but mainly dishes (prepared and cooked by me) made from a mixture of around 11 varieties of dried beans to replace the meat (Can’t eat the recommended “oily fish” it’s indigestible to me and makes me nauseous!).  Do I feel better for it?  Yes!  Do I miss the meat?  No!  The cheese I do, but I have it as a “treat” once in a while.  Oh, my current cholesterol level?  A more acceptable 4.0!

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The thing about weight loss is we are all different.  In size (‘ideal’ in body fat terms compared to reality), in outlook and in physicality.

 
One of the targets for reduction in useless and so-called damaging to health habits is our taste buds.  A simple thing like taking a level teaspoon of sugar, if you absolutely have to have it, instead of a heaped one has an accumulative effect which, taken with other remedies, has significant value. 8 cups (that's average apparently!) a day works out to 56 teaspoons a week. Just in tea. That must be about a pound of sugar. Over a year, well, needn't go on.  We are born with neither a sweet tooth or tongue, they grow without preference and are trained by us, so retraining works wonders and can be looked on as having similar benefits as exercising. Cakes. Don't. Or at least not on occasions other than a family wedding. The current craze for suicide by TV baking progs is contributing far to much to gluttony.
 
A big factor is obviously exercise. The gym if you need it of course, but strenuous activity has a downside too. Ageing joints and musculature get tired quickly and it's easy to overdo it in the name of enthusiasm. The resultant endorphins are deceptive. There is a newsagent 200 yards from my house. Conscious of the need to keep weight off sensibly, I now choose to walk 1.5 miles to Tesco for a daily paper and a kipper for breakfast.  That's three miles every day with the last quarter mile uphill where I dig in and give it some welly. Oh yes, and oily fish very day. Another real benefit is to the constitution if I can tastefully put it that way.
 
My early years were spent as a butcher so I enjoy eating meat and do so every day, but only grilled.  Haven't eaten anything fried in 30 years. I'm 75, an ex-smoker (35 years) and 10 lbs overweight, which in my view is near enough. When I get home, take my shoes and coat off, put my keys on the hook and empty my pockets of shrapnel I'm about right. But that's fine for me. Each will follow their preferred route.
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One hell of an achievement Countryboy!

Going from a worryingly high cholesterol without being overweight to the low end of acceptable by diet must give you great comfort.  

Cholesterol reduction to this degree is regrettably incredibly hard to achieve for most people.

 

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I often used to be late for work when taking the tube, so was always walking flat out for a total of 3km a day, BMI 21.  Then work moved and I needed to drive 38miles each way each day around the M25.  The waistline gained two inches in two months so, being too mean to buy new clothes, instead of lunch I took up swimming at a pool near to work; waistline rapidly back to normal, BMI back to 21.  Lunch was now just a glass of water and two maxpak soups afterwards from the free work machine, simply to replace the salt sweated out into the pool during 1.5km trying to keep up with the others in the lane (not enough time during lunch break to do any more).

Retirement, and the local pool is longer (33.3m vs 25m) and has a good regular crowd, so now I do anything between 3.5km and 5km two or three times a week at lunchtime depending on lane availability and traffic.  BMI thirteen years after retirement is still less than 22.  I eat almost everything, but avoid animal fats, most vegetable oils and ALL fried stuff, the only oil to eat is olive oil.

Running has always hurt my knees and ankles, right from school, so I save the leg exercise for full kick on all swimming strokes and of course the real passion skiing; standing still on a couple of planks at 30mph is much easier than running.  Front crawl forces one to breath properly giving one about 1000metres of altitude pre-acclimatisation, and the chlorine toughens up the sinuses against hay-fever. I used to hate swimming, having been drowned at 7, before then I could swim, and I was only cajoled back into it 35 years later when the rest of my family took it up.

We are all different, and we will all have different methods for keeping in shape and remaining healthy.  I was lucky in that the swimming meant I was fit enough for a major operation in 2016, with almost no visceral fat in the way (according to the MRI scan they showed me), merely a subcutaneous blubber layer to keep the cold out (very appropriate).

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Not going to press the thank button on every post but say thanks all. Some real uplifting and thought provoking posts.

One more plus point. You have also improved the power to weight ratio of your MX-5.

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Have always said, if you haven’t pulled it out of the ground or “necked” it yourself, you don’t know what’s in it.

 

Years ago we read a book “It’s not what it says on the label”. Frightening how the food industry lies to us.

 

Think of how our mams shopped before supermarkets, everything fresh from a different shop.

 

My age doubles my waistband

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The healthiest diet we had in this country was when we had rationing!  There weren’t any unhealthy snacks or fast food to “pig-out” on.  I can remember a snack being a piece of raw carrot!

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I know there have been huge improvements in health care but I find it strange that we generally lazier, fatter, drink more alcohol? and have worse diets than our forebears but live significantly longer.

Perhaps less stress?       

 

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Bliddy raw carrot? Snob.

When I were a lad it was a half cup of cold gravel from 't pit, washed down with water scooped up by hand from the gutter.

And that was just on Sundays.

On a freezing day, the gravel froze over, and that was our ice cream. If we were lucky. Pah!

 

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Ah! but rationing was over by the time thee was birthed so thee didn’t benefit from it’s bounty!

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General erosions of personal & family values,(eg family sit down meals), from the 70’s onwards in my opinion.  Consumer driven demands led to avalanches of convenience shyte ( Vesta Beef Curry & Boil in the bag anything), freezers killing off the need for fresh foods, disposable incomes overtaking the % of food budgets so we buy more than we need. Anyone read the label on a Pot Noodle? Vomit inducing. Biscuits, bakery, and protein dressings laden with saturated fats, plus the explosion of cheap designer booze, and I hate to say, a burgeoning Welfare State making it possible as never before to sit back and scoff the lot. My local Tesco is a Can’t Work/Wont Work extension to the local Broo it seems. Scores of them are lazy blubber laden neon haired thigh chaffing wasters filling their trolleys with hi carb comfort processed poo. And, they just don’t care. So yes, we are now the fattest nation in Europe. 20% of school kids are already obese. Because…we can. I got fat after being written off by a drunk and having my spine severely damaged. Everyone can help themselves if they want to. Everyone can not bother if they are not inclined to have a word with themselves in the nearest mirror. Population is going to the dogs on a number of levels…starting with personal life style choices.

My wife is really the expert. She watched this decline of 42 years in the classroom. She wrote a 200 page report, in conjunction with a health visitor, a GP, and a surgeon…all family friends.

This report was sent to both the Scottish Office Education depts, and the Health Board. She was thanked for her input. Last she ever heard of it.

Fair enough…carry on then and let all the kids eat an early grave.     

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