Has anyone ever done this? I am thinking of Oprah.

Basically, I have been dieting since I was 13. Mostly reducing calories. I suspect my body has become super good at suppressing the metabolism at the slightest reduction in food. After a very calorie restricted diet in 2012 I came back at 1200 BMR, in 2018 I came back at 1590 and this week I came back at 1770. Same machine, same weight.

So I am thinking of just slightly reducing food.. 100 cals under my RMR (1550) and doing all that I can to burn the 400 cals via exercise (including neat exercise).

My goal is to burn 120 cals daily via exercise (walking or something / lifting weights) and 280 or so just at work / around the house. Activities of daily living.

Doable?

You cannot outrun a bad diet.

This! I can't remember which person originally said this now popular saying but ....

Abs are made in the kitchen.

From personal experience, abs are made in the kitchen. No one who eats a high carb diet has abs. Even the vegans I know eat 65% or less from carbs if they're toned.

Yep. And vegans get most of their carbs from veggies. And Oprah, bless her heart, never lost weight from just exercising. No matter how much we move it, move it, move it we need to eat our way to slim.

I completely agree with you all that food reduction is 90% of the job, however AnnRue's proposed scope is do-able I think, and would definitely improve health, wellbeing, etc etc as well as the calorie deficit - so I say YES in this case - do the extra moving for 400cal per day and get your weight-loss and all the other benefits thrown in!

Most people are too lazy/busy to churn out another 400 cals per day on exercise but if you're motivated I think it's a great way to go. The only problem then would be keeping it up long-term because it would be easy to not do this for a day every now and then, and be unwilling to cut 400cals from the diet which would throw out your weekly averages quite a lot - so would you therefore aim for 500 per day and therefore build in a 'day off' every week as a contingency? But then that's a LOT of exercise....

The Okinawan diet (one of the healthiest diets) is mostly vegan, and about 85% carbs. There's no reason why you can't get abs on that diet.

The exact carbs/protein/fat ratio isn't important. The important thing is to eat whole foods such as vegetables, legumes, fruits, nuts, seeds, and whole grains.

Personally I eat a lot of nuts, so my diet is higher in fat.

Bless you for a reasoned response to my post. It is quite impossible for me to burn off 400 calories a day via exercise. I work a long job and would not have the time OR the energy to do so. I also don't think it is sustainable for a long time period. We all have those times where we just can't do it.


So the 500 deficit from TDEE has to be made up of.

- a small decrease in calories (150 per day under the BMR)

- weight lifting to increase metabolism. 4% or so (extra 85 calories burned on BMR)

- a daily exercise you do anyway -- walking around work for 10 hours. (300 calories)

- a small 20 or 30 minute extra exercise period per day. (100 calories - walking or something at lunch)


An interesting thing that happened to me. I have been on a diet at least every year since 2006. Likely all too little food. My vitals came down significantly. So much so that my doctor always is stumped as to why I am fat but still have low BP and low heart rate (or normal). Well since I have made an active attempt to eat more food and rev the metabolism... my blood pressure has gone up 20 pts ( but this is good because it is now normal) and my BP has gone from 60 and lower at night to 75. I feel so much better and have more energy with a normal BP and heart rate. And frankly some information suggests that heart rate is directly related to metabolism.


Have I lost weight? No. But it is hard to tell. I have seen that when you start a weight training program you can gain from 3 to 8 lbs of muscle/ water. So my scale hasn't really moved in over a month. So seems to me that I am not going to see a reduction in my scale until I have lost 8 or more lbs of fat... (approximately 8 months or more in). Have I lost inches... well it is hard to say but definitely last week I put something on that was too tight for me and thought... this seems loose. If after 8 months I have lost zero on the scale, I will drop my calories by 100 and start using fasting to make sure I am burning fat over glycogen.

You seem to be missing the most important part: Eating healthy whole foods. This is important for two reasons: Because unhealthy foods can cause you to burn fewer calories, and because unhealthy foods are less filling, so you're more likely to overeat. If you eat 1600 calories of junk food per day, it'll be hard to lose weight. If you eat 1600 calories of healthy whole foods, you'll easily lose weight.

For example, in this study, 49 women were separated into 2 groups. One group was instructed to add 3 apples or 3 pears to their daily diet for 10 weeks. The other group was instructed to add 3 cookies to their daily diet. The fruit and the cookies had the same number of calories. The fruit group lost 0.93 kg on average, and the cookie group gained 0.21 kg on average.

I don't believe I ever said I was "binging on junk". I eat three solid meals per day and one snack. When I was "dieting" I just ate less at meals and had no snack. Honestly this just set me up for binges. Now that I am "full" at the end of the day I rarely if ever can muster up the desire to binge or eat back foods in any quantity but yes, sometimes you just need a sweet snack.


Something interesting I noticed as well, when I was dieting and I had my calorie count at 1000 per day... I would kind of lie to myself. Because it was just extremely hard in the modern world not to go over that calorie count. So I would lie to myself about calories. And I might think I was taking in 1000 calories but really took in 1200. Now eating 1500 calories I am much more honest and much more generous with the calories because I believe I have to he room. So I may only be eating 300 more calories than I might on a diet but feel so much more satisfied.


In addition I got my stomach bacteria tested. I wish there was a clearer result but it said I had a high metabolic fitness. I suspect that means, it is possible I get more energy out of food than other people (because I have bacteria that is efficient at extracting energy from food). So it is possible that if I eat 1500 cals I get 1600 cals. But something else is that it says that I have low biome diversity. Is this because I have hardly been eating ANY food for 10 years? If perhaps I ate more and different type of food would I get a better biome?


One note on this, I do try to choose nuts for a snack. Nuts have quietly been proven to contain less calories than what they say on the package. They have "resistant starch" and that doesn't get digested. So you get about 30% less calories than is on the package.


This morning I woke up and I was down 1 lb. I am putting the scale away now for a little while and using that to motivate myself.

For a healthy gut microbiome, it's important to get enough fiber, so be sure to eat a variety of vegetables and legumes. According to this study, chickpeas are good for your microbiome.

This thread interests me so I looked up some of the terms. High metobolic fitness does not mean you are getting more calories than you eat. It means that your body burns more fat during exercise and also at rest. This is probably from exercise. In most cases exercise will not bring weight loss but that does not mean it is not important. Anne you have proven the importance of exercise with the good lab results in spite of being "fat" as you say. Because you have been exercising in an effort to lose weight you have become healthier than some thinner people who don't exercise. That is a lesson to be learned by others.

Biome diversity means it is best to have a high variety of gut bacteria which is why we are told to eat a wide variety of foods, fruits and vegetables. There used to be 10 varieties of green/lettuce in stores.
Now there are 3. People like my DH who only like iceberg lettuce in salads are missing many varieties of phytonutrients that are necessary to health. I think your years of dieting have caused this as you are eating less and therefore getting fewer varieties of nutrients. It isn't just you. We are all doing this in an effort to see a lower number on the scale. Most people don't get tested for this like you did and just don't know. This is all just my own opinion from what I googled. Its a little late but I am interested in changing my health as far as gut biome and nutrients by eating high nutrient foods and exercising. This discussion has been helpful. I am going to research this further.

I just don't know because that doesn't jive with what is happening. I had my RMR tested and I think it is accurate because this is the third time I had it tested and it tracks with the facts. And it says my RMR is 1700 ish. I work a relatively active job so multiply to 1.2 and I should have a TDEE of about 2000. So I have been eating about 1500 calories each day for over a month and I have not lost one lb. Also presumably lifting weights for about 30 minutes should have me burn off about 50 cals.

Of course, this could be that I have gained weight from muscle growth and so I am not seeing fat loss but I don't see anything on my clothing either.

So unfortunately I am going to have to drop to 1400 per day to see if that does anything.

I'm sorry to hear this, Ann. I know it is discouraging. I wonder about this testing. They come up with numbers but how do they know they are right about what the results really represent? So many other things come into play with weight loss. Fluid retention, hormones. It is probably best to do just what works for you. If you need to lower calories, try some intermittent fasting, mix things up so your body does not adapt to one thing. IF with watching carbs is what works best for me but I fall off the wagon easily.

Yes. It is true. You just can't tell. I have been on diets so many times in my life I have a guess about where I do lose. Typically I lose about 1lb per week if I eat about 1000 cals per day. With no extra exercise or weight lifting. But that is just too little to live in the world.

I have also heard that weight lifting keeps water in your body as your body uses water for muscle and also wants to hold on to glycogen.

I have been on this 1500 cal diet per day. Assuming that I burn off 200 calories a day, over a month, in theory I should have lost about 1.5 lbs over a month. However, it is extremely easy to gain both muscle and water when exercising and lifting weights so I might not see anything at all for 3 or 4 months.