Keeping weight off

[Redwolf]

I've been working on my weight loss for 2 years now, sporadically. I'm 50 lb less now than I was this time in 2006, but there's more to go (15-20 lb).
I've recently been trying to do Weight Watchers with my wife, and we found out that there is supposedly some chemical in the 100-calorie packs that can make you feel hungry again. And I do find that I tend to have the munchies more if I've been eating those. So, that may be something to be cautious about.

I've been using them for over a year now and haven't encountered any problems. I think that may be an urban legend.

When you think about it, just about every company now makes 100 calorie packs. The likelihood that they would have coordinated on including some substance to increase your munchies is pretty slim.

Hmmm...seems that Weight Watchers has their own brand of reduced-calorie munchies. Marketing at work, perhaps?

http://www.foodprocessing.com/articles/2006/065.html

Redwolf

[I.D.10-t]

Boredom is the spice that adds flavor to much of my food.

[sbfluter]

The "problem" (it remains to be seen exactly what my problem is) I have is that I have already lost the weight. And I did it in an extreme way.

I walked 20 to 27 miles every day for 3 months. Actually, I started out walking 15 miles a day and it gradually became 27 miles, but that's still pretty extreme.

I had to learn how to read the food labels during this time. Anything with less than 1/2 fat calories was a waste of money. I had to learn to stock up on calories in town with such horrors as biscuits and gravy and pancake sandwiches with jam, butter AND syrup. If I didn't do these things I had no energy to hike and I'd get depressed and find myself crying down the trail.

Over time, the greasy, fatty stuff and anything with a plastic wrapper on it just grossed me out and I'd go to town and gorge on salads and fruit. (Cobb salad, the one with the bacon all over it.) One thing I never did that other hikers did was eat whole pints, even whole half gallons of Ben & Jerry's. I could not do such a thing.

I believe I did a reasonable job with nutrition because I stopped feeling hungry all the time. The only things I really craved were lemonade, fruit and veggies and anything fresh and that's where I still am. It's all I want to eat. If it still looks like what it was in the ground, the air or the sea then I'll eat it. Otherwise, yuck. With some exceptions anyway.

So, 100 calorie snack packs? I'd rather eat seaweed.

Anyway, I hiked all those miles and lost all that weight and yet, like most of the other women I saw on the trail, I never became emaciated in appearance. Most of the men got that way but the women did not. I believe women are programmed well to handle extreme endurance activities.

So what's the outcome of something like this I wonder? Did my metabolism speed up or slow down? Upon ceasing the activity will my body go back to normal or will it believe it's starving and a famine is upon it and it better hoard and stockpile in case I get pregnant or something (Hullo! Not possible!) I feel sorry for it. I wish I could tell it everything will be ok.

I wish I knew what to do, but the "literature" out there on the Internet assumes everybody is a sloth sitting on the couch. I walked a marathon every day for months. Has there been any research about what happens to you if you do that and what you should do afterwards? I would like to keep the weight off but I really have no idea what my body is going through.

[Redwolf]

Well, I tried to help, anyway.

I lost weight through extreme measures as well.

Fine...eat seaweed. It's available at your local health food store.

Redwolf

[djm]

Has there been any research about what happens to you if you do that and what you should do afterwards?

I do not personally know of anything to suit your situation, but there are marathons run all over the place. There are university hospitals with sports clinics that tend to the needs of people who do marathons. I'll bet that if you could make some contacts at one of these sports clinics that someone there could help you, or at least point you in the right direction to get the information you seek.

djm

[Jack]

It seems like a lot of people are using that "alli" stuff but I heard it has some nasty side effects if you don't do it right.

[Jerry Freeman]

It's important to note, each person responds to different macronutrients (protein/carbs/fats) in his or her own way.

One person can eat a small carbohydrate snack, and that will be fine. Another person eating the same small carbohydrate snack will immediately crave more, or will feel OK but then be hungry again very soon.

This is because one person's insulin response to carbohydrates is not the same as another's, which means that some people's blood sugar will roller coaster on carbohydrates while others' will stay steady.

Some people do best if they're careful to eat carbohydrates together with some fatty and protein foods. Some people do best if they keep their carbohydrate intake very low overall, by favoring the proteins and oils and avoiding carbohydrates for the most part (please don't lecture me on this; I'm one of those people, and it makes a big difference). And some people do very well on a high carbohydrate, low protein, low fat regimen.

So the point is, there isn't one right approach, or at least there isn't one approach that's right for everyone. I do think there may be one approach that's best for a particular person during a particular period of time, though.

Best wishes,
Jerry

[fel bautista]

I know if I tried to loose the 10-20 lbs and get me back to where I could climb hills well on my bike, it would take about 3 months of daily riding, at least an hour if not an hour and half a day. It used to take about a month and a half when I was 50, but now that <ahem> I'm older, it seems to take a lot longer to get into any shape at all, other than pear like

[Lambchop]

there is supposedly some chemical in the 100-calorie packs that can make you feel hungry again. .

Uh, I believe that would be . . . sugar.

I agree that there isn't a conspiracy among manufacturers to sneak in a chemical to make you eat more. They don't need to--the sugar alone will do it. Monosodium glutamate (MSG) will do it, too. It's in a lot of savoury-salty snack mixes.

Weight Watchers seems to focus on the notion that if you think about food, about preparing food, and about eating food constantly, that you'll lose weight. I hate going to work when one of my coworkers is on WW, because I know I'll have to listen to a continual barrage of food-related talk, look at scales and measuring equipment, smell the nasty frozen products being microwaved, and listen to bag after bag after bag of 100-cal packs being ripped open and the contents crunched, crunched, crunched. After which they all go out to eat at an all-u-can-eat place because they're ravenous.

Then, when I take off 10 pounds using the radical notion of . . . not eating as much and walking an hour a day . . . they warn me that it will ruin my health.

I loathe Weight Watchers and consider it to be one of the prime causes of obesity. (Just my opinion, you understand! If it works for you, that's great, but I have never seen it work for anyone and it sure is annoying to everyone else.)

[djm]

I knew a girl at work that went on one of those prepared-food diets - can't remember if it was WW or not - one with most of the fat removed from the foods. She lost a lot of weight over the course of several months and was looking much better.

When she hit the weight she wanted to she went off the prepared food - and got immensely sick. She couldn't handle fats in her food, at least not for a long while.

Within a year she was back to where she had started. The great experiment was over.

djm

[Thomaston]

I'm not 100% sold on WW either, to be honest. I lost my weight the old-fashioned way, with exercise and keeping an eye on how many calories I was eating. I'm doing WW now (unofficially... I'm not doing the classes) and it seems to be mostly the same foods I was eating already, but with a support system and a different (and more complicated) way to add up daily intake. But, it's still easier to eat what my wife eats, so I do WW, more or less.
As for the 100-cal packs, I don't know where I said that conspiracies were involved. It may very well be that MSG was what they were talking about. And nothing was mentioned about the WW brand, according to my wife.
But, this is all off-topic.
If I were in your shoes, sbfluter, I'd try to get the same amount of calories every day, and if you see weight gain start cutting back 100-200 calories a day per week until you find the number that works best with your metabolism to maintain.

[Loren]

Work to build muscle. every pound of muscle you build burns an extra 100 calories/day. Cardio is great, but if you want to maintain weight, you need to build.

Sorry Mark, this is not purely true, although it's become a very common saying of late.

Adding muscle does help burn additional calories, but it is not necessary in order to lose or maintain weight.

Loren
ACE and NASM Certified Personal Trainer
Sports Club/LA Boston

[Cork]

I'd like to suggest another perspective, that is, rather than being concerned about keeping excess weight off, try thinking about maintaining a healthy weight, a weight that makes you feel good about yourself, not too fat, and not too thin.

After that, it's simply a matter of being conscious of just what you eat, and how it's cooked, if at all. Moreover, if you simply avoid the "bad" foods, and the "bad" methods of cooking food, you can then "pig out" on the good stuff.

A medical doctor I know once described white bread as being nutritionally nothing more than sugar, plain and simple. Therefore, white bread goes on the "bad" list.

Food is my luxury, and I love to eat, but, I eat smart, and I'm not "fat", or "thin".

See if that approach could work for you.

[Loren]

Diane,

The good news is that there are answers to your questions, the bad news is that I'm so busy with clients this week that I'm working 12-14 hour days and can't write it all down at the moment. I will attempt to make the time to get back to this thread on one of my days off.


Loren
ACE and NASM Certified Personal Trainer
Sports Club/LA Boston

[chrisoff]

I'd like to suggest another perspective, that is, rather than being concerned about keeping excess weight off, try thinking about maintaining a healthy weight, a weight that makes you feel good about yourself, not too fat, and not too thin.

After that, it's simply a matter of being conscious of just what you eat, and how it's cooked, if at all. Moreover, if you simply avoid the "bad" foods, and the "bad" methods of cooking food, you can then "pig out" on the good stuff.

A medical doctor I know once described white bread as being nutritionally nothing more than sugar, plain and simple. Therefore, white bread goes on the "bad" list.

Food is my luxury, and I love to eat, but, I eat smart, and I'm not "fat", or "thin".

See if that approach could work for you.

This ^

Don't go on a diet, or weight watchers. It's a short term solution. Long term, cook your own food, cut down on snacks like chocolate, drink diet/light coke (there's no good reason to drink full fat coke and after a few months on diet you'll hate the taste of normal) and do more excercise (compared to your normal routine rather than your 27 miles a day routine).

To keep weight off your basically looking at making lots of small, permanent changes to your lifestyle rather than one big, but short term, change.

If you do that you can still eat (and drink) things that are horrendously bad for you as long as you don't do it all the time. Basically you still get to have fun with food.