The dieting thread

[egg_fried_rice]

5 hours ago, Cadno'r Cymoedd said:

Just a quick follow up on my post above and thanks by the way for the likes and comments.

 

I now realise the huge importance of hydration and fibre in supporting healthy eating and weight management. So I drink a couple of pints of water - with a good squirt of fresh lemon juice - each morning as a start. I also supplement my breakfast (plain Skyr with blueberries and honey) with cold milled flaxseed (Linwood) and chia seeds, both in Tesco. They actually add to the taste. That pushes your fibre up - get at least 35 grams in every day. Not trying to preach, or state the bleedin' obvious, just some things I've learned personally over last six months or so. 

 

Preach, brother.

 

How tall are you and what are your daily calorie goals? I've been going down the MFP route too since march and have lost over a stone so far from the exact same starting weight as you.

Unfortunately a couple of long standing injuries mean the exercise isn't what it used to be, although I finally saw a consultant about my knee this morning and am going for an MRI. Aim to sort the wrist out next then hopefully I can get back to the gym. How do you get on with exercising on a calorie deficit? I seem to get fatigued noticeably more quickly compared with when I'm eating 'normally'.

[Cadno'r Cymoedd]

2 hours ago, egg_fried_rice said:

Preach, brother.

 

How tall are you and what are your daily calorie goals? I've been going down the MFP route too since march and have lost over a stone so far from the exact same starting weight as you.

Unfortunately a couple of long standing injuries mean the exercise isn't what it used to be, although I finally saw a consultant about my knee this morning and am going for an MRI. Aim to sort the wrist out next then hopefully I can get back to the gym. How do you get on with exercising on a calorie deficit? I seem to get fatigued noticeably more quickly compared with when I'm eating 'normally'.

6 feet tall. I now maintain my weight with net 2,600 calories per day. So on days I train, I put in my estimated calories burned and eat more to keep that net calories consumption. I also have macros of 40% carbs, 30% each protein and fat. I keep the protein quite high as trying to build muscle. I don't beat myself up too much if I miss targets slightly especially if carbs up and protein down or if I have a day over and then a day under, if it evens out on the whole. When I was set on losing weight, I had 1800 calories as my daily target. I kept the carbs and protein up but dropped the fat. You'll get most of your energy from your (complex) carbs and so I ensured I didn't cut those dramatically. 

 

Hope you get my injuries sorted. I had a niggle with my wrist a few weeks back and had to break from training which was a pain.

 

Try this free kindle book by Marc McLean -

Strength Training Nutrition 101. Excellent. I perhaps overdo the protein...

Edited 24 May 2018 by Cadno'r Cymoedd

[Buce]

28 minutes ago, Cadno'r Cymoedd said:

6 feet tall. I now maintain my weight with net 2,600 calories per day. So on days I train, I put in my estimated calories burned and eat more to keep that net calories consumption. I also have macros of 40% carbs, 30% each protein and fat. I keep the protein quite high as trying to build muscle. I don't beat myself up too much if I miss targets slightly especially if carbs up and protein down or if I have a day over and then a day under, if it evens out on the whole. When I was set on losing weight, I had 1800 calories as my daily target. I kept the carbs and protein up but dropped the fat. You'll get most of your energy from your (complex) carbs and so I ensured I didn't cut those dramatically. 

 

Hope you get my injuries sorted. I had a niggle with my wrist a few weeks back and had to break from training which was a pain.

 

Try this free kindle book by Marc McLean -

Strength Training Nutrition 101. Excellent. I perhaps overdo the protein...

 

2

 

Be wary of that:

 

https://www.healthline.com/health/too-much-protein#risks

[Cadno'r Cymoedd]

14 hours ago, Buce said:

 

Be wary of that:

 

https://www.healthline.com/health/too-much-protein#risks

Thanks. When I say overdo, I don't mean overly excessive but could perhaps pare it back and still get the benefit in terms of muscle building. I also get much of my protein from non red meat sources. 

Edited 25 May 2018 by Cadno'r Cymoedd

[egg_fried_rice]

15 hours ago, Cadno'r Cymoedd said:

6 feet tall. I now maintain my weight with net 2,600 calories per day. So on days I train, I put in my estimated calories burned and eat more to keep that net calories consumption. I also have macros of 40% carbs, 30% each protein and fat. I keep the protein quite high as trying to build muscle. I don't beat myself up too much if I miss targets slightly especially if carbs up and protein down or if I have a day over and then a day under, if it evens out on the whole. When I was set on losing weight, I had 1800 calories as my daily target. I kept the carbs and protein up but dropped the fat. You'll get most of your energy from your (complex) carbs and so I ensured I didn't cut those dramatically. 

 

Hope you get my injuries sorted. I had a niggle with my wrist a few weeks back and had to break from training which was a pain.

 

Try this free kindle book by Marc McLean -

Strength Training Nutrition 101. Excellent. I perhaps overdo the protein...

 

Thanks for the info. Were you also resistance training on the 1800 a day? My daily intake is about 1700 which works for me, but leaves me feeling fatigued during exercise like I said before. Maybe I should try upping the intake on those days. I've also read MFP dramatically overestimates calories burned from exercise, did you have any issues with that?

 

After a difficult first couple of weeks, I actually find the discipline required for the whole process quite rewarding.

[Cadno'r Cymoedd]

7 hours ago, Cadno'r Cymoedd said:

Thanks. When I say overdo, I don't mean overly excessive but could perhaps pare it back and still get the benefit in terms of muscle building. I also get much of my protein from non red meat sources. 

 

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180522-we-dont-need-nearly-as-much-protein-as-we-consume

 

Suggests it is difficult to overconsume protein.

[Cadno'r Cymoedd]

9 hours ago, egg_fried_rice said:

Thanks for the info. Were you also resistance training on the 1800 a day? My daily intake is about 1700 which works for me, but leaves me feeling fatigued during exercise like I said before. Maybe I should try upping the intake on those days. I've also read MFP dramatically overestimates calories burned from exercise, did you have any issues with that?

 

After a difficult first couple of weeks, I actually find the discipline required for the whole process quite rewarding.

I was ok working out on 1800 calories as long as it was net. Also the timing of eating is key and what you eat pre and post workout with a need for appropriate carbs to avoid fatigue. I did and do have a post workout protein shake using 92% purity whey, Pink Sky - no hormones, organic grass fed cows. I tend to have rest days between heavy (1 hour) workouts although I do a short 10- 15 minutes burst each day of press ups, pull ups etc. That helps with fatigue. Once I got to the weight I wanted I calculated how much was needed for maintenance, adjusting the macros as I indicated above to strengthen/build muscle whilst staying lean. Getting there hopefully. 

 

I agree that MFP is poor on estimating calories burned and I don't use it for that. Instead I worked out a much more conservative estimate for my workouts. 

[Buce]

 

I wasn't sure whether to put this in here or the politics thread, tbh:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/03/obesity-food-poverty-cheap-bread

 

The miller’s tale: poverty, obesity and the 45p loaf

The UK’s public health epidemic is forcing a rethink on how low-income families can enjoy a better diet

 

Cinnamon Square craft bakery, in a historic building in Rickmansworth, near Watford, has been full of children on their half-term break learning the ancient art of proving and kneading dough.

Its owner, Paul Barker, likes to set a test to help them see how different “real” bread is from the white, sliced factory loaf most of them are used to. Take a piece of white sliced and rub it in your hands; it quickly turns in to a grey, tacky ball that looks as unappetising as old chewing gum. Try the same with a well-made loaf and it just breaks in to crumbs. Think about the chewing-gum-like lump in your stomach. You may be able to buy a large loaf of that for as little as 45p in the supermarket, but how much good will it do you?

“We focus on time – it takes anything from 27 hours to 152 hours to make one of our loaves. The bread is more nutritious, more flavoursome and more digestible. The children are so not used to it, but they are converted,” Barker said. He has passed on his award-winning bread-making skills to more than 12,000 children to date, visiting primary and secondary schools as well as giving classes in his bakery.

Barker’s evangelism is admirable, but necessarily limited in scale. At a national level, the government’s new obesity strategy is set to be published, with some expecting it this week. But the scale of the task facing those who want to change British children’s eating habits was brought into sharp focus last week by figures from the Local Government Association. When they arrive in reception, nearly 15,000 British four- and five-year-olds are not just overweight but severely obese. By the time they finish primary school, the number of severely obese is well over 22,000, more than 4% of 11-year-olds.

 

If those figures sound disturbing, deeper analysis shows the true picture. Fat is a class issue. At age five, children in poor households are twice as likely to be obese as those in richer ones. By age 11, they are three times as likely to be obese, as MPs on the health select committee reported last week. In affluent Richmond upon Thames, in south-west London, 11% of 11-year-olds are obese, compared with 28% in deprived Barking and Dagenham, in the east of the capital.

This inequality gap has grown much bigger in the past decade. Obesity is a disease of poverty, much as cholera was in the 19th century. It does not exclusively affect the poor, and rates are going up across the board, but those who live in deprived areas have far less chance of escaping it – or the catalogue of diseases that come with it, from cancer to diabetes.

Researchers studying this “social gradient in overweight” across different countries see a pattern emerging. Obesity is a form of malnutrition, they argue, and the greater the structural inequality within a society, the more that people living under financial and social constraints lack the opportunities for an active, healthy life.

Tam Fry, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, says: “The simple matter is that obesity is usually the province of socio-economic grades D and E, who cannot afford fruit and vegetables even when they know about good diet, so they feed their families highly processed food, which is less nutritious.”

How we now make our bread – a staple for centuries – sums up the problems of a society where healthy eating comes at a price that is just too high for many. “I don’t touch white sliced bread myself,” said Fry, “but it’s cheap, and you can stuff something cheap between it, which may also be highly processed and unhealthy, and call it a sandwich, a meal. There is a distinct difference between the lower and the middle-class larder.”

Barker makes bread the way it has been made for generations, using just well-milled flour, yeast, water, and a little salt. Bread like this is called the staff of life because it contains so many vital nutrients: essential fats, fibre, protein, more than 20 vitamins and minerals, and carbohydrates. Since staples by definition account for a large proportion of our intake, if the staple of the diet is healthy, it is much easier to ensure that the diet overall is healthy. But the nutritional gulf between a well-made wholemeal loaf and a white-sliced factory one is enormous.

When whole wheat is milled into white flour, the vitamins and minerals are reduced by more than half. The essential-oil-rich germ, which has the greatest concentration of nutrients, is sold off as animal feed. Concern that over-refining might be leaving humans malnourished compared with their livestock was first raised in 1919, and eventually governments required millers to put back a few of the vitamins and minerals through fortification, although they are not restored to the levels found in wholemeal flour.

It was in the early 1960s that scientists at the British Baking Industries Research Association in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, developed a way of making bread that dispensed with the time required by traditional methods.

They found air and water could be incorporated into dough if it was mixed at very high speeds in mechanical mixers. It needed double the quantity of yeast to make it rise, and chemical oxidants to get the gas in, and hardened fat to provide structure – without the fat the bread collapsed, in early experiments.

Since flavour develops during proving, the new loaf needed more salt to make it taste of something. It also needed emulsifiers to plug the gaps, enabling the dough to retain more air. The process removed labour, reduced costs and gave much higher yields of bread from each sack of flour because the dough absorbed so much more water. The chemicals needed are now mostly incorporated into a premix of additives with soya flour, and labelled as “flour treatment agents”. Extra pure gluten is added to strengthen the flour so it can survive the factory process. This Chorleywood bread process is now ubiquitous, and just three giant baking companies dominate the British market.

White bread like this has a glycaemic index score of around 70 (the GI index measures how rapidly food triggers a rise in blood sugar and the release of insulin). Excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates over-stimulates insulin production, leading to blood-sugar highs and lows, which leave you feeling hungry and liable to overeat. Wholemeal bread scores only 50. Stoneground wholemeal is lower still at 30. The slower release of its energy keeps you feeling full longer.

On health grounds the choice between the two should be simple. But Barker’s bread costs £2.45 for a large white, and more than £4 for a large speciality wheat and rye loaf. A supermarket white sliced loss leader can cost just 45p. And this is only one example of the poor being routinely priced out of healthier food.

Whatever the government comes up with this week, Elizabeth Dowler, professor emerita at Warwick University, who has researched food poverty for the government, says better wages must be part of any solution. Which should mean less cheap bread in shopping baskets.

“Cheap bread is unpleasant, pappy, not particularly nutritious and, because of the way it’s metabolised, can easily contribute [to being overweight],” she says.

“Obesity is the canary in the mine. It tells us there is something seriously wrong with not just the food system but the whole economic system. When you talk to poor parents about how they manage on very low incomes, you learn that they have so little that food is a long, long way down the list. Unless you address the social contexts in which people live, you’ll never really tackle obesity. What they are up against will continue to defeat them.”

Felicity Lawrence is author of Not on the Label (Penguin, £9.99).

Weight of evidence

28%

Percentage of obese 11-year-olds in Barking and Dagenham, a deprived area of London, whereas in more affluent Richmond uopn Thames the figure drops to 11%

45p

The price of a basic sliced white loaf – fifth of the cost of a traditionally made white loaf from a specialist baker

20

Number of vitamins and minerals in a non-processed loaf of bread which, with essential fats, fibre, protein and carbohydrates, make up what we need for good health

15,000

The number of British four- and five-year-olds who are severely obese when they start school

70

Glycaemic index score for a basic loaf of processed white bread; its wholemeal equivalent scores 50 and stoneground wholemeal 30

[Countryfox]

 

No mention of the D word when cruising ...    had my full English earlier ..   now on the pizza chips and beer leg ...   then a spot of lunch ...    

[Dr The Singh]

Flying to the US on Saturday for work, and then 6 weeks until 3 week's holiday in Orlando....seriously need to cut the booze and calories.

[Countryfox]

 

Back from my cruise ...   do you remember that film with Arnie in where he is trying to find that rebel leader on Mars or somewhere or other ...   the bloke has the little leader attached to his gut ...   well, all I need is to draw a face on my belly with a marker pen and I could play that role ...   

[Suzie the Fox]

1 hour ago, Countryfox said:

 

Back from my cruise ...   do you remember that film with Arnie in where he is trying to find that rebel leader on Mars or somewhere or other ...   the bloke has the little leader attached to his gut ...   well, all I need is to draw a face on my belly with a marker pen and I could play that role ...   

Total recall. One of my fave movies ever 

[DANGEROUS TIGER]

Chinese chicken and veg. are my downfall at the moment. Eating between meals makes it worse, but it's comfort food for boredom. Not helping myself am I?

[Countryfox]

On 09/06/2018 at 13:06, Countryfox said:

 

Back from my cruise ...   do you remember that film with Arnie in where he is trying to find that rebel leader on Mars or somewhere or other ...   the bloke has the little leader attached to his gut ...   well, all I need is to draw a face on my belly with a marker pen and I could play that role ...   

 

Two days fasting and I’ve shifted the little fooker ! ..   

[Countryfox]

On 09/06/2018 at 14:49, Suzie the Fox said:

Total recall. One of my fave movies ever 

 

One of my top Arnie films with Terminator and Predator but very hard to decide which is best ...

[Suzie the Fox]

Just now, Countryfox said:

 

One of my top Arnie films with Terminator and Predator but very hard to decide which is best ...

Loved all of them. I think Terminator is perhaps top of my list of his movies. But they were all great. 

[Buce]

 

For those of you who want to eat more healthily but struggle with knowing how, I can really recommend this website:

 

https://hurrythefoodup.com/category/recipes/

 

The recipes are grouped by whatever it is you are trying to achieve (whether that be weight loss, increased protein, gluten-free, dairy-free, low-carb etc) and carry a full nutritional analysis, listing calories, protein, carbs, fats, vitamins and minerals. You can even filter for preparation time.

[Countryfox]

3 minutes ago, Buce said:

 

For those of you who want to eat more healthily but struggle with knowing how, I can really recommend this website:

 

https://hurrythefoodup.com/category/recipes/

 

The recipes are grouped by whatever it is you are trying to achieve (whether that be weight loss, increased protein, gluten-free, dairy-free, low-carb etc) and carry a full nutritional analysis, listing calories, protein, carbs, fats, vitamins and minerals. You can even filter for preparation time.

 

Can't seem to find the  'How to get the perfect beer belly' recipe/group ...   but fear not ...   I know it already and can give advice if required ...   

[Buce]

1 minute ago, Countryfox said:

 

Can't seem to find the  'How to get the perfect beer belly' recipe/group ...   but fear not ...   I know it already and can give advice if required ...   

 

Yeah, probably a no-brainer that one.

[Costock_Fox]

Top dieting tip- if it’s the weekend and it isn’t a carb put it in the bin.

[Sol thewall Bamba]

Last few weeks of 2018, back on 16/8 intermittent fasting in the new year. Weirdly I lost weight when I stopped fasting the last few months, but that may have been a reduction in calories. 

[Captain...]

54 minutes ago, Sol thewall Bamba said:

Last few weeks of 2018, back on 16/8 intermittent fasting in the new year. Weirdly I lost weight when I stopped fasting the last few months, but that may have been a reduction in calories. 

Did you also stop exercising? Muscle weighs more than fat so it is not uncommon to stop a diet and fitness regime and find that you lose weight due to muscle atrophy, whilst adding fat.

Edited 19 November 2018 by Captain...

[Sol thewall Bamba]

18 hours ago, Captain... said:

Did you also stop exercising? Muscle weighs more than fat so it is not uncommon to stop a diet and fitness regime and find that you lose weight due to muscle atrophy, whilst adding fat.

Exercise is still the same, muscle mass is about the same but I'm leaner, which is the exact opposite of what I expected to happen

Edited 20 November 2018 by Sol thewall Bamba

[The People's Hero]

Found the thread. Prepare yourself for boring updates on my keto experiment. 

[Buce]

1 hour ago, The People's Hero said:

Found the thread. Prepare yourself for boring updates on my keto experiment. 

 

Oh, please do.

 

I love trashing faddy diets.