Quote:
Originally Posted by BIG B00TY
But i keep hearing that if you don't eat enough you wont lose the weight.
If you join one of those delivered food diets, they sure don't send everyone different amounts of food.:
You will lose weight eating low calories, at first. Some people are lucky enough that they can continue the low calories for a long time. I know some people who have lost almost all their weight doing low calories.
I am not one of those people. I started at 407 and did a combination of eating plans (most low cal) until I hit about 300 pounds. I did this in 10 months. My body got used to the lower calories and I reached a point where I could barely lose weight (3 - 5 pounds a month). I added lots of exercise (I was already in a job that was fairly active) and continued to drop my calories. None of that worked. My hair thinned, I would get home at the end of the day and not even have enough energy to go for a short swim. I also ignored random, but persistent pain (symptom of something that became more serious). I was eating (at the highest) 1500 calories, but closer to 1200/1300 each day. I did an hour of really heart pumping cardio 5 days a week, worked on my feet all day walking around. The last three months of my dieting I lost 10 pounds total. I ended up in the hospital (those pains I ignored) which derailed the process completely.
Maintaining would have been nice, but over the next few years I gained 70 pounds of it back. This time I'm doing less cardio, some strength training, and just trying to be more active in daily living. I don't sit at the computer for more than 15 mins without getting up and walking around (preferably up the stairs and back). I'm eating 2150 cals on days I don't exercise and 2400 on days that I do. You know something - I'm losing 2lbs a week pretty consistently. I even took a diet break last month for a week where I ate a
planned 3000+ cals a day - and I lost more last month than the past two or three months. I don't want to reach my goal weight only to find that I need to eat 1000 cals a day for the rest of my life. My 80 yr-old mother eats closer to 1800-2000 cals a day, does no regular exercise, oh and eats candy that I haven't included in that calorie count. Some people would say she has a great metabolism, but if you watch her she's rarely at rest. She putters around a lot (a concept called NEAT -
http://mayoresearch.mayo.edu/mayo/re..._lab/about.cfm). I think this is sometimes a problem with dieters. You put so much energy into a 60 min scheduled workout that you don't do anything else all day. The small constant movements may burn just as much.
Maybe I'm not going to see 3 and 4 pound a week losses like I have in the past. However, I'm eating in a way I can continue to eat for the rest of my life. I've found an exercise (lifting weights) that I really enjoy and look forward to doing. I haven't seen a week where I haven't lost weight since I started the weight lifting. I'm not sure that they are truly tied together, however, I started eating more at the time which may have helped as well. I'm also very consistent with water intake as well. I found at the beginning (this time) of my weight loss that inconsistent water intake really would throw my numbers out of whack.
The cardio is a necessary evil, however, I only do 4x30min sessions a week (on two days, so an hour twice a week). I track what I eat very consistently though. I don't go to bed without working out what I'm going to have the next day. I'm to the point now where I can usually make substitutions on the fly when the mood hits (or I forget to take something out of the freezer the night before). However, when I do that I go back to the tracking software and adjust it right away. I eat 6 or even 7 times a day and although I have 'slight hunger' moments it's never binge type hunger.
As to the delivery services not adjusting for different people's weights. My opinion on this is that they really don't know how to. The better ones will add more snacks, etc. but even that's not a really good solution.