Criticize My Diet Plan

Ya, on work days I'd weigh myself two or three times in the morning and then start weighing again when I got home, but that (plus much more time at home the other two days per week) was still enough. And when you have a scale at home, standing on it for a few seconds at a time several times per day is pretty far from "all-consuming".

There's mixed research on the benefit of frequent monitoring, and the advice may actually change with technology.

I'm not specifically recommending this brand, but just as an example, I have a WiThings scale, which transmits a session's information to a database via WiFi. This is very convenient and means I can weigh myself frequently but control my knowledge by only looking at the results, say, on the weekend. It also means I am more likely to weigh myself regularly, since I don't have to put the scale near a notepad or in my office near the computer. I found that with the old TANITA, even though I weighed myself daily, I kept forgetting to boot up the computer and key it in.

The proliferation of automation falls under the category of 'lifehacks' and I would say it's premature to endorse or dismiss these realtime feedback approaches. My personal opinion, though, is that most are not making any difference.
 
Nobody's talking about a starvation diet. A diet of intermittent fasting is very different.

I suspect the problem lies in that word 'fast'.

To me, it means an entire waking day without food. In other systems it seems to mean something else, like the length of a waking day (16 hours, say) between meals.

Difference is that the former has sleep before it and after it, so is a much longer spell without eating.

And then some consider a low-cal day as 'fasting', which makes no sense to me at all. Fast or don't, but eating lightly isn't 'fasting'.
 
Difference is that the former has sleep before it and after it, so is a much longer spell without eating.

Not long enough to affect your metabolism, though.

And then some consider a low-cal day as 'fasting', which makes no sense to me at all. Fast or don't, but eating lightly isn't 'fasting'.

You're wrong

fast
verb (used without object)

1. to abstain from all food.
2. to eat only sparingly or of certain kinds of food, especially as a religious observance.

verb (used with object)

3. to cause to abstain entirely from or limit food; put on a fast: to fast a patient for a day before surgery.

noun

4. an abstinence from food, or a limiting of one's food, especially when voluntary and as a religious observance; fasting.
 
I tend to agree, but I have a hard time convincing my wife that I have to weigh the solid excrement separately from the liquid to get even close to an accurate accounting. People at work understand and don't mess with my scales, but she seems to miss the point.

Nobody doing the "calories in-calories out" thing has any suggestions on better ways to count these calories? Hmm.
 
Not long enough to affect your metabolism, though.

I don't think GlennB was making any particular claim about the effectiveness of fasting. Just that fasting has confusing colloquial interpretations. I said pretty much the same thing with my post about there being an infinite number of fasting diets. It's impossible to 'disprove' the effectiveness of a very vague strategy.




I'm not sure what your point was with that dictionary definition. The original poster explained that his 'fasting' days involve eating small amounts of food, ergo the scare quotes in his original post.
 
Oh, yeah, I wouldn't dream of advocating any kid of starvation diet. It's just that the first thing I did before even considering the 5:2 diet was to check with as many reputable sources as I could find for any potential health risks. Eating's not something you can take a cavalier attitude towards, so I was just curious as to whether you were in possession of information I'd not seen.

Nothing: I think we're aligned on the basic safety of a 5:2 diet as proposed.

Bruto mentioned a practical risk in post #42 - low blood glucose can lead to low alertness, not good for driving or operating heavy equipment.
 
I'm not sure what your point was with that dictionary definition. The original poster explained that his 'fasting' days involve eating small amounts of food, ergo the scare quotes in his original post.

And then some consider a low-cal day as 'fasting', which makes no sense to me at all. Fast or don't, but eating lightly isn't 'fasting'.

It is fasting.
 
That would require you to be near a set of scales all day every day which seems to me to not be practical for everybody.........

.....never mind the stripping down to underpants every time!

That's a serious point. If you are weighing yourself constantly, you are only talking about grammes or ounces differences in weight, and your clothes will vary by an awful lot more than that. Take your tie off and your weight will change. Wear leather brogues or training shoes (do you call them sneakers?) and your weight will change.

I simply don't see any advantage to such a regime.

Mike
 
One of my goals for this year is to lose weight. I finally got around to writing up a clear and concise diet plan, and would appreciate any input that might help improve it.

If someone can think of a better name for it than the one I came up with, maybe it could become the next popular fad-diet! :)

Looking up other threads about diets on this forum, I see some mention of a 5:2 diet which I hadn't heard about before today. I suppose my diet is similar to that because it involves intermittent fasting, but unlike the 5:2 diet the fasting isn't done on fixed intervals and can (theoretically) be avoided altogether if you can get your weight down without fasting.




Personally I intend to reduce my target weight by 1kg (2.2lb) each week to begin with, because I've managed to lose weight at that rate in the past (but I didn't stick with my old weight-loss plans so ended up putting it all back on when I fell back into old habits).

But I wrote down half a kilo each week in the plan because I'll probably switch to that later when I begin to approach a more healthy weight (and it's probably a more realistic goal for most people).

The idea for this plan comes from something I once came up to keep the weight off when I got down to my desired weight. (But I never did get down to my desired weight, and so never put the plan into action.)

(Part of what spurred me to write this up now is that I got myself a new scale last week. I got tired of the old one displaying ERR because I weighed slightly too much for it to measure. But now I'm slightly under the weight that causes it to produce that error... but nevermind. I like the new one better. I don't have to slap it hard with my foot to activate it, and the backlit display is a lot easier to read.)

Certainly, making a commitment in a web forum and report periodically may help you persevere ... or make you a big liar :D

I'm an "expert" in these questions, as I have lost like 800 pounds myself ;)

A few comments about your plan -not that there's a lot to say about it-:

  • Don't choose your desired weight unless it's a weight you already had as an adult, you kept it at least 6 months and you felt good having it without having to make any special effort to that end.
  • Fasting may be good from time to time provided you eat a minimum of carbohydrates to avoid ketosis which can depress appetite. If you are semi-fasting and you are not very hungry, well, do it. If you contain your hunger, say, 6 hours and you have taken a walk, doing other activities and keeping you mind away from it, but it's still there, stop fasting at once. NO DIET WORKS IN THE LONG RUN IF IT DIVORCES FROM THE WAYS YOUR OWN BODY REGULATES ITS WEIGHT.
  • A digital scale for daily use and weighting yourself every day at the same hour with the same kind of clothes is very very good. Expecting that your weight is going to show a linear drop is mad and wrong in so many a way that you better get rid of your scale. Mainly it's mad to sudden-switch your diet plan according to what your scale shows today. You weight yourself to get informed and learn. And weight yourself daily when you are not on a diet, as if you had tweaked your diet then you wouldn't be in a predicament now. The best way to "lose weight" is not gaining it, and the way of not gaining it is to stop eating a plenty when you're weighting yourself day after day and the scale shows through a constant value that you are getting away with it.
  • A weekly target is OK. For short diets, a 1 to 1.2% of your weight is OK. For important diets -4 months or more- 0.5 to 0.7% of your weight per week is a reasonable target.
  • NEVER fast because you fail to meet a target. When you do the right things sometimes you are gaining weight. Never prepare for the weighing like a boxer -by avoiding a glass of water or eating parsley or celery the day before because their diuretic effects-. Ketosis also causes an increase in diuresis, so it's easy to meet the target by almost fasting the day before, but it's all an unnecessary self scam. You will never learn how to eat well and keep a healthy weight by making your diet a matter of daily speculation.
  • The diet ends when you have reached a reasonable weight and you have managed to keep it, say, 6 weeks, if it was a recently gained weight, or 3 months if it was "very old weight".
The most important thing I learned in all this business of diets is that there are some "barriers" -that's the name I give to them- meaning your body is prepared to keep your weight between two limits at any given time and it will do anything to achieve it. To break the up-barrier you need to create new adipocytes, to break the down-barrier you need an event of adipocyte apoptosis. Your body will regulate your resting metabolic rate to keep you "in the zone". If you eat like a bull, your RMR may increase a 30% -it changes from person to person and according to circumstances-. If you follow a diet, your RMR may decrease a 30% or more to save your life-. Those mechanisms have tens of million years in the making to guarantee the survival of the species and you are not going to "twist their arms" because you looked in the mirror and didn't like what you saw.

Those barriers are pretty spread -they depend on your ideal weight- and in these times of food at hand we tend to be close to the upper end, so it's easy to us to lose some weight until we reach the lower end, say, 8-9 pounds in the typical man, 6-7 pounds in a woman. Then the resistance begins. Once you defeat it, if you defeat it, you continue to the following barrier. You may have lost some 20 pounds if you are a man or 15 pounds if you are a woman, and the madness starts again. By this time most of the people have lost resolve and many of them are in unhealthy equilibrium with their barrier: eating little, as little as their desperate bodies accept to burn, so they are reaching the very wrong conclusion that being thin is not achievable for them. If you are in a hypo-caloric diet and you don't lose weight week after week, change your diet plan: make keeping that weight your target and add more food to it.

Detecting the barriers and acting accordingly -and patiently- seems to be the key to losing weight and not recovering it. Easier said than done.
 
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Don't choose your desired weight unless it's a weight you already had as an adult, you kept it at least 6 months and you felt good having it without having to make any special effort to that end.

I'm going to ignore this. My target weight is 100kg (220lb)... what I weighed as a teenager at the end of high-school. Checking a BMI calculator, at 100kg I'd have a BMI of 29.5, which would put me in the category of "overweight", but at 102kg I'd have a BMI of 30, which puts me in the category of "obese".

So my present goal is to become overweight. :) (Instead of obese.)

Last Sunday I weighed in at 150.4kg (330.9lb), this morning (Saturday) I weighed 148.8kg (327.4lb)... I have a long way to go.

(Once I achieve my present goal, I can then think about setting a new goal to get my weight into a healthy range.)

NO DIET WORKS IN THE LONG RUN IF IT DIVORCES FROM THE WAYS YOUR OWN BODY REGULATES ITS WEIGHT.

What does divorcing from the ways our bodies regulate weight even mean?

My body seems to regulate itself to around 150kg (plus or minus 1kg) when I simply eat whatever I want whenever I feel like it. It stays in that range for years on end.

Expecting that your weight is going to show a linear drop is mad and wrong in so many a way that you better get rid of your scale. Mainly it's mad to sudden-switch your diet plan according to what your scale shows today.

Okay, I'm mad. But maybe my diet plan is just crazy enough to work. :p

And weight yourself daily when you are not on a diet, as if you had tweaked your diet then you wouldn't be in a predicament now.

I have weighed myself daily when not on a diet. But just observing my weight and how it changes little or no immediate incentive to abstain from indulging in excess food consumption throughout the day, as the increase in weight from a single day's indulgence is of little or no importance in the long run. And the same applies for the next day, and the next, until days of indulgence run into years.

That's the point of doing things the way I've laid out in my plan (although I intend to post a modified version later).

It forces me to pay attention to what I eat, to abstain from over-consumption, because I want to avoid having to semi-fast the following day to compensate for the indulgences of today.

The best way to "lose weight" is not gaining it,

And I suppose the best way to cure a broken leg is to not break it. :rolleyes:

For important diets -4 months or more- 0.5 to 0.7% of your weight per week is a reasonable target.

In that case my target of losing 1kg (2.2lb) per week to begin with falls into your "reasonable" range (0.7% of 148kg is 1.036kg). Nice to know that you agree with me!

NEVER fast because you fail to meet a target.

I'm not fasting because I fail to meet a target, I'm fasting because it's necessary in order achieve my target. I'm simply using the scale to provide me with an objective (albeit arbitrary) determination of whether or not to fast on any given day in order to remain on-track to meet this target.

Never prepare for the weighing like a boxer -by avoiding a glass of water or eating parsley or celery the day before because their diuretic effects-. Ketosis also causes an increase in diuresis, so it's easy to meet the target by almost fasting the day before, but it's all an unnecessary self scam.

I'm not avoiding glasses of water or intentionally consuming diuretic substances to get a lower reading on the scale. I keep a glass of water beside my alarm-clock. If I'm thirsty when I wake-up, I drink. If I need to pee when I wake-up, I pee. Then I weigh myself. I'm not trying to manipulate the scale in that way.

And I sincerely doubt that a single day of low-calorie consumption is sufficient to induce Ketosis.

The diet ends when you have reached a reasonable weight and you have managed to keep it, say, 6 weeks, if it was a recently gained weight, or 3 months if it was "very old weight".

The diet never ends, otherwise you fall back into old habits and regain the weight.

Detecting the barriers and acting accordingly -and patiently- seems to be the key to losing weight and not recovering it. Easier said than done.

If I find myself unable to lose weight beyond a certain point I fully intend to back off and concentrate on maintaining my weight (to avoid regaining what I've already lost) for a few weeks before trying again.
 
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One of my goals for this year is to lose weight...
This is a great goal and well worth the effort.

Exercise, and being aware of the ingredients in foods in order to avoid those which harm, is vital to health and well being.
 
It's not actually quite that simple. It's not a simple case of calories in vs. calories out. The body is a more complex machine than that.
Why not?

My approach is, I guess, simple-minded. I was overweight. So I dropped down to one meal per day. The first few days were kinda tough but now it seems normal. I'm hungry a lot but I just ignore it.
 
And:



So... I'm probably not understanding. Do you live on Mercury or something?

Shorthand. I've just worked it out exactly and 75 hours was exaggerating it was "only" 71. And what I mean by that is that I started work at 5AM on Friday and worked continuously without a break until 2PM on Monday.


Because how much you eat affects your metabolism. This means that it's possible to reduce your calorific intake too much. It's possible that if you were eating slightly more you'd lose weight faster. There's also the issue of what you eat. Not all weight is fat. You can retain water. And not all weight loss is fat, either, you can reduce muscle from what you eat, and muscle is heavier than fat.

When going on a diet, it's not wise to just arbitrarily choose a number of calories to eat per day, or just to arbitrarily cut out meals. If you're going to go on a calorie controlled diet, then you should do research and work out how many calories you should have each day in order to maximise your weight loss without damaging your health (and damaging your health is another reason you shouldn't just choose to reduce your calories by an arbitrary amount - you can do yourself permanent damage). You should also ensure that you still eat a wide variety of healthy foods. Eating 1,500 calories of chips every day isn't going to be as good as eating 1,500 calories of steamed vegetables and rice one day and 1,500 calories of pasta, salad and home-made sauce the next, etc. It won't be as good in terms of losing weight and it won't be as good in terms of ensuring you don't do yourself harm.

The body is a complicated machine with all sorts of self-correcting mechanisms and mechanisms designed to maximise efficiency from the food it ingests. Calories in vs. calories out is far too simplistic a model.
 
I meant more in terms of how much time is spent thinking about it. I think about my diet at meal times, and that's it. I couldn't imagine thinking about it all the time.
That's why I didn't suggest anything even vaguely resembling that.

.....never mind the stripping down to underpants every time!
That would be a pretty silly thing to bother adding to what I've described.

If you are weighing yourself constantly, you are only talking about grammes or ounces differences in weight...
A scale that works in half-pound (eight-ounce) increments is quite precise enough, since the amount that goes in & out of you each day is a few pounds.

...and your clothes will vary by an awful lot more than that. Take your tie off and your weight will change. Wear leather brogues or training shoes (do you call them sneakers?) and your weight will change.
Not to the extent that I've seen some people think, but it doesn't even really matter. If you change clothes, you can weigh yourself immediately and see the difference and adjust for it, and it doesn't take many rounds of that to come to know the weight of whatever you're wearing anyway. And if you keep the same clothes on all day (or spend much of your home time naked anyway), there's nothing to adjust for because you're only watching the changes from what goes into & out from your body and any factor that doesn't change from one weighing to the next or throughout the day doesn't contribute to the changes you're looking at.
 
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I'm going to ignore this.

I'm going to act under the hypothesis you won't accept in the beginning the very criticism you asked yourself ... but you always are more flexible in the future. Let's say you'll reread the whole thread in six weeks.

My target weight is 100kg (220lb)... what I weighed as a teenager at the end of high-school. Checking a BMI calculator, at 100kg I'd have a BMI of 29.5, which would put me in the category of "overweight", but at 102kg I'd have a BMI of 30, which puts me in the category of "obese".

So my present goal is to become overweight. :) (Instead of obese.)

That IS doing what I recommended. If you feel that saying you're not doing it helps you, be my guest.

You're a bit shorter than me, that's the only exact bit of information BMI conveys. Don't pay much attention to BMI. It's just a loose reference.

Last Sunday I weighed in at 150.4kg (330.9lb), this morning (Saturday) I weighed 148.8kg (327.4lb)... I have a long way to go.

(Once I achieve my present goal, I can then think about setting a new goal to get my weight into a healthy range.)

12 to 15 months would be the time, but consider to chose ambitious but attainable targets, like losing 17 Kg (37 pounds) and keep your new weight several months.

What does divorcing from the ways our bodies regulate weight even mean?

It looks like you wasn't paying much attention when you was reading, but just for extreme starters, that losing weight is not like quitting smoking. You can't just quit eating. To some this is such an obvious piece of information that they completely fail to understand it.

My body seems to regulate itself to around 150kg (plus or minus 1kg) when I simply eat whatever I want whenever I feel like it. It stays in that range for years on end.

That's what I meant by barriers. It seems you are in the bracket 145-150kg pound more, pound less, and I suspect 153 kg may have been your maximum weight ever -or 340 pounds, if you weighted yourself in the afternoon or evening-.

Let me guess, a shot in the dark, so to speak. If you ate reasonably, you kept 149 Kg. If you started to overeat a bit, your weight went to 150 kg and you felt you had more energy, and if you overate even more you then reached 151 kg, and you felt a bit uncomfortable, a bit sweaty and with some troubles to sleep.

That would mean that you can easily reach 147 kg, 146.8 kg and then the resistance begins (move the values according to the difference in the previous paragraph), mildly at first. You may not detect any trouble until you reach 146 kg, your body start to "starve" and a lot of mechanism to save energy and urge you to get food trigger. You're reaching the lower end of your current weight bracket and your "what does divorcing from the ways our bodies regulate weight even mean?" may start to answer by itself.

Okay, I'm mad. But maybe my diet plan is just crazy enough to work. :p

In sight of that phrase, what do you think a dietitian would think about your chances of losing 110 pounds in a single diet period?

I have weighed myself daily when not on a diet. But just observing my weight and how it changes little or no immediate incentive to abstain from indulging in excess food consumption throughout the day, as the increase in weight from a single day's indulgence is of little or no importance in the long run. And the same applies for the next day, and the next, until days of indulgence run into years.

That's the point of doing things the way I've laid out in my plan (although I intend to post a modified version later).

It forces me to pay attention to what I eat, to abstain from over-consumption, because I want to avoid having to semi-fast the following day to compensate for the indulgences of today.

It's all full of short-termed prescriptions in the hope it'd allow you to reach ambitious goals and definitive changes in life style.

And I suppose the best way to cure a broken leg is to not break it. :rolleyes:

You got it. You're very cerebral :rolleyes:.

In that case my target of losing 1kg (2.2lb) per week to begin with falls into your "reasonable" range (0.7% of 148kg is 1.036kg). Nice to know that you agree with me!

But you are aware that will make sense only after 10 or 12 weeks of meeting weekly goals without a major fail, aren't you?

I'm not fasting because I fail to meet a target, I'm fasting because it's necessary in order achieve my target. I'm simply using the scale to provide me with an objective (albeit arbitrary) determination of whether or not to fast on any given day in order to remain on-track to meet this target.

Short-termed again.

I'm not avoiding glasses of water or intentionally consuming diuretic substances to get a lower reading on the scale. I keep a glass of water beside my alarm-clock. If I'm thirsty when I wake-up, I drink. If I need to pee when I wake-up, I pee. Then I weigh myself. I'm not trying to manipulate the scale in that way.

Good to now that if someone tells the public "drugs are dangerously addictive" you will stand and shout to him "I don't do drugs!!!!".

And I sincerely doubt that a single day of low-calorie consumption is sufficient to induce Ketosis.

Then you have to learn instead of hold doubts or not. Of course, ketosis at a dangerous level is not easy to reach. But at least be aware of how different levels of ketonemia feel. Be also aware that in that case you will lose some muscular tissue together with the adipose tissue volume you intended to lose.

The diet never ends, otherwise you fall back into old habits and regain the weight.

You are so wrong in many levels here. Your phrase feigns to be realistic but it contains the seed of failure itself, and the knowledge of its failure too.


If I find myself unable to lose weight beyond a certain point I fully intend to back off and concentrate on maintaining my weight (to avoid regaining what I've already lost) for a few weeks before trying again.

Gain 4 or 5 pounds above that certain seemingly insurmountable point and do as you told. That itself can be the difference between success and failure.
 

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