Criticize My Diet Plan

[aleCcowaN]

http://39stonecyclist.com/am-i-too-heavy-for-a-bike/

Thank you for that link. This fellow has a positive message to deliver.

I found that walking is to me an essential aid when I arrive to a "barrier". Your body can change its BMR but it can do little about how much energy you spend by walking the same mile. I find that diet plus walking some four miles a day during 7-8 days are enough to break the barrier down and you can cope with the suffering without being enervated -morally and physically- to undertake the next stage in your diet, unless you become overly ambitious. That next stage would be easier, be it losing weight until the next barrier is at sight or start to eat normally and keep your weight stable when you know that your scale will instantly reflect the fact that you are eating too much or too little.

 

[jimbob]

Thank you for that link. This fellow has a positive message to deliver.

I found that walking is to me an essential aid when I arrive to a "barrier". Your body can change its BMR but it can do little about how much energy you spend by walking the same mile. I find that diet plus walking some four miles a day during 7-8 days are enough to break the barrier down and you can cope with the suffering without being enervated -morally and physically- to undertake the next stage in your diet, unless you become overly ambitious. That next stage would be easier, be it losing weight until the next barrier is at sight or start to eat normally and keep your weight stable when you know that your scale will instantly reflect the fact that you are eating too much or too little.

I guess that's what he's been doing in effect.

 

[Janadele]

Effective communication makes all the difference. If the body has certain expectations which are not met, then it will manifest symptoms.
If instead you speak with your own body and explain that certain foods will be restricted, eliminated, or a fast is to commence, then the body will accept and adapt to the circumstances, and will not be expecting otherwise.

.

 

[jimbob]

What does that even mean?

 

[Skwinty]

For those interested in weight, diet, diabetes and heart disease.

Please take the time to listen to Professor Tim Noakes on what South Africa needs to do to reduce obesity.

Sugar and carbohydrates are the enemy.

http://t.co/6GhIdNdfjs

 

[Brian-M]

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.

I was referring to that specific bit of advice, not your entire post, and I explained why.

But it's only natural that I should try to defend my original position from criticism, even when that criticism is asked for. The whole point of asking for criticism is to force myself to think about aspects of it I might not have considered before, not to uncritically accept whatever advice anyone offers.

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

You recommend that I pick a target weight I already had as an adult and kept for at least 6 months. I'm picking a weight that I haven't "kept for at least 6 months" since I was a teenager, not an adult.

That's not doing what you recommended.

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.

I'm not paying any attention to BMI. Until responding to your post I hadn't even bothered to calculate it.

I suspect 153 kg may have been your maximum weight

I wouldn't know. My old scale only showed up to 150.9 kg. Anything above that just showed up as Err.

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?

That would depend entirely on the duration of the diet period. If the diet period was a couple of months, he'd say that it was absurd. If the diet period was a couple of decades, he'd say that it was easily achievable.

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?

Losing 0.7% of my bodyweight per week "will make sense only after 10 or 12 weeks of meeting weekly goals without a major fail"?

I don't understand what you're trying to say. The sentence doesn't seem to be fully coherent.

Short-termed again.

Achieving major long-term goals is much easier if you break them up into minor short-term goals.

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!!!!".

If someone makes a public statement "drugs are dangerously addictive" that's seemingly directed at me (as your statement about diuretics and cheating the scale appeared to be), my response would most likely be one of the following....

• I don't do drugs.
• So what?
• Which drugs, specifically?

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.

I don't see how the assertion that eventually abandoning a diet carries the strong likelihood of reverting to old eating habits and regaining the lost weight is wrong on any level. Care to explain further?

 

[Delvo]

I couldn't imagine thinking about it all the time.

How can you weigh yourself without thinking about your weight?

When you decided to change your story about when the thinking-about-it happens, what did you think the odds were that that would go unnoticed?

 

[Iamme]

.....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

Take a big dump and your weight will change.

 

[Iamme]

How can you weigh yourself without thinking about your weight?

Set an open Playboy Magazine down by the scale.

 

[aleCcowaN]

You recommend that I pick a target weight I already had as an adult and kept for at least 6 months. I'm picking a weight that I haven't "kept for at least 6 months" since I was a teenager, not an adult.

That's not doing what you recommended.

Were you then as tall as you are now, or half an inch less? If the answer is "yes", you were an adult for the sake of what I was saying. What do you expect? I already speak in a pretty complicated way because as every person learning a second language I am forced to say what I can and not to say what I want.

I wouldn't know. My old scale only showed up to 150.9 kg. Anything above that just showed up as Err.

Then you have the problem of not having precise information. Anyway, you said you were in 150 kg plus/minus 1, so it would be a safer bet to say there's a barrier about that weight. Only you can tell.

Losing 0.7% of my bodyweight per week "will make sense only after 10 or 12 weeks of meeting weekly goals without a major fail"?

I don't understand what you're trying to say. The sentence doesn't seem to be fully coherent.

If you can't keep it that time, then it wasn't a reasonable target. The problem with diet targets is that they usually partly set by one's superego. And losing 20 pounds in a month or 100 pounds in 18 months are not very different in that aspect.

Achieving major long-term goals is much easier if you break them up into minor short-term goals.

Oh, yeah, that always works. Like in frying some bacon, or preparing a batch of concrete, or making love, when focusing in the moment and constantly changing what you're doing to optimize every second really pays off.

If someone makes a public statement "drugs are dangerously addictive" that's seemingly directed at me

Who was giving advice directed exclusively at you? You're in the public areas of a forum that is not NBC nor FOX but it isn't a casual chat in an elevator either: a few hundreds will read this, spanned a few years. Nobody knows about you -except what you decided to reveal-. Most of us, if not everybody, don't know your age, your height and constitution type -I had to "reverse-engineered" some data from your words-. And that's seemingly directed ad you? Pal, you mixed up being the prime mover of the thread with being the sole recipient of every advice in it.

I don't see how the assertion that eventually abandoning a diet carries the strong likelihood of reverting to old eating habits and regaining the lost weight is wrong on any level. Care to explain further?

Your sentence implies that you, as most overweight people, think that it's all "moral" or psychological at most. You fail to see that the same way you feel different in different weights -different versions of you, if you want-, your body works differently about how it cares for its own weight. Remember that self-regulating systems like body weight and the adipose tissue as an organ, it all belongs to the deepest and more primitive levels of the unconscious: you won't tell it what to do; you are at most a 6-inch tall person who might learn some judo to use the force of his opponent.

Eating like a pig and looking like one is unnatural. Following a diet is as unnatural as that. What you are saying boils to "I have an eating disorder and I need to replace it with a better eating disorder."

Think! Losing weight, like quitting alcohol or smoking, is a voyage to a better knowledge of your own self. Don't be like those people who never learn anything because they understand all too quickly.

 

[jimbob]

For those interested in weight, diet, diabetes and heart disease.

Please take the time to listen to Professor Tim Noakes on what South Africa needs to do to reduce obesity.

Sugar and carbohydrates are the enemy.

http://t.co/6GhIdNdfjs

This week's Horizon was discussing that - I won't link to it as it was a good 10-minute program smeared over an hour's broadcast.

TLDR: rats allowed to eat either as much fat or as much sugar as they wished didn't put on much weight. rats allowed to eat as much of a 50:50 ratio fat:sugar (e.g. cheescake) put on weight and became sedentary.

Similar data has been observed in humans too.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

When you decided to change your story about when the thinking-about-it happens, what did you think the odds were that that would go unnoticed?

I have changed nothing. Weighing yourself all the time = thinking about your weight all the time.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

Set an open Playboy Magazine down by the scale.

Because you'll be too busy thinking "dear god look how bad those fake boobs are, why did she do that to herself? Not even the massive amounts of Photoshopping that makes her look like a cartoon character rather than a human being can disguise those bad fake boobs"?

 

[Brian-M]

Just for the record, here's my new, improved and much gentler diet plan. (I even came up with a better name for it.)

Upper Limit Diet​

Requirements

• Digital Scale
• Post-It notes and Pen
• Low Calorie Snacks (such as fruit, low-fat yoghurt, etc)

Preparation

Place your scale somewhere convenient. You’ll be weighing yourself every morning.

The night before you begin the diet, weigh yourself. Round the scale reading up to the nearest whole number and write this figure on a post-it note. Place this post-it note where it can easily be seen when you weigh yourself.

The figure on the post-it note is the Upper Limit you’ll be starting with.

Method

Weigh yourself when you get up each morning.

Any morning that you weigh more than your Upper Limit:

Eat nothing but four low-calorie snacks throughout the day. Eat one low-calorie in place of each meal, and one in the evening so you don’t have to go to bed hungry. Stick to low-calorie drinks such as water, diet cola and skim milk.
​

Any Morning that you do not weigh more than your Upper Limit:

Reduce your Upper Limit by a small amount, replacing the post-it note with a new one displaying the lowered Upper Limit...

• Lower by 0.1 kg or 0.2 lb if attempting rapid weight loss (hard)
• Lower by 0.05 kg or 0.1 lb if attempting basic weight loss (normal)
• Lower by 0.025 kg or 0.05 lb if attempting gradual weight loss (easy)

You can always switch between these options, depending on what you feel capable of at the time.

(It doesn’t matter if your Upper Limit has more digits after the decimal point than your scale, just pretend you have a few more zeros after the final digit on the scale.)
​

Once your Upper Limit is the same as your desired weight, you don’t need to reduce your Upper Limit any further. You never quit the diet, you just stop reducing the Upper Limit. By sticking to the diet, you ensure that the weight stays off.

The key to this diet is to treat it as a challenge. Use your desire to avoid low-calorie days as motivation to pay closer attention to what you eat, as an incentive to improve your eating habits. It’s possible to avoid low-calorie days most of the time by trying to stay ahead of the limit.

As with most diets, best results are achieved when combined with a daily exercise routine.

I'll resurrect this thread in a year or two and post my results.

 

[Doghouse Reilly]

I think the difficulty with your question is that 'large boned' isn't a thing.

What do you mean by this? Of course "large boned" is a thing...skeleton/bone size varies significantly between people of the same height. Some people have small skeletons and some people have large, robust skeletons. A person with a larger frame (8 inch wrists instead of 6 inch wrists) will be much heavier than a person with a smaller frame. This has to be accounted for. That's why I think body fat percentage, if measured accurately, is a better way of gauging optimum weight than the scale is. It eliminates guesswork as to how much weight is due to muscle, water retention, frame/bone size, etc.

 

[jimbob]

Just for the record, here's my new, improved and much gentler diet plan. (I even came up with a better name for it.)




I'll resurrect this thread in a year or two and post my results.

I can see the psychological benefit of small targets and I am a complete layperson with no particular expertise.

However,


I think there is a risk that you are going to get hit by day-to day variation.

On top of that, reducing your upper limit by less than 1-Oz (25g) is going to be lost in measurement noise. The trouble is that even 100g (3.5-Oz) could easily be in the measurement noise of your scales.



Good luck with whatever approach you take.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Just for the record, here's my new, improved and much gentler diet plan. (I even came up with a better name for it.)




I'll resurrect this thread in a year or two and post my results.

You have a real problem: You think that your body is like your car, you put 20 litres of gas, petrol, or the way people call it, and your car weighs 17.5 kg more; you travel a hundred miles, use those 20 litres and your car is again 17.5 kg lighter. No eukaryote functions that way, from amoeba to blue whale, including any biped mammal, skinny or overweighted. I'll come back to this below in this post.

About your plan:

• It doesn't contain the actual diet, so you're setting limits and basically you're just putting the overweighted people's expectations on a diet, not their bodies. Those limits are intended to 75 yo 4f10 grannies as well as 25 yo 6f7 youngsters with a BMI of 40.
• Successful plans with weight goals use bands of weight to avoid the constant changes. If you start, say, with 150 kg, make your first day's goal a weight between 148.4 and 149.9 kg -always your weight when you get up in the morning-. Move the band daily and try to stay in the middle. Start making small changes if you start to get close to one of the limits: don't wait until you're in the upper limit to replace a meal with "diet snacks" -if that is your diet. And don't get greedy and force yourself into "stone skimming" the lower limits. Diets that are just to lose weight are at most a transitory success. Diets that combine losing weight with learning to eat well -and not to live in a permanent state of diet- are more likely to sustain and succeed.
• Don't use targets implying weight loss below 0.5% of your actual weight per week: they fail once you reach what I call "barriers", as they don't have enough momentum to overcome the ways your body uses to avoid "starvation", that is, "diet".
• Your band-less plan is extremely dangerous when you get close to a barrier. The normal adaptation to weight loss -remember that what you want is not what your body wants- is a change in leptin levels with systemic effects on metabolism -by slowing it- and appetite -by becoming ravenous unless ketonic bodies are depressing the centre of appetite-. But to make bad things worse, moving to a lower barrier implies to get rid of a mass of adipocytes and that process has an inflammatory effect, so you may be doing things extremely well and even gain one kilo while you're starving all day long, a resolve-vanishing combination that is behind many people attacking a half-gallon ice-cream bucket or a braised ham, failing their otherwise good diets. You need the band to manage these changes, which also includes your body responding to specific food items and weather changes.

I could say a lot more on this, but I want to make clear that you as a person deserve from me and everybody else all the encouragement and support in any diet plan that you may be undertaking. But you can't make from your personal plan a prescription for everybody -as you did- and post in in a forum for dozens of even a few hundred people to read it and yet avoid the harsh criticism your plan deserves. It's a matter of ethics, not idealized ethics, but a practical one: if misleading prescriptions can be avoided by making a through argumentation, harsh criticism and a verbal brawl if circumstances demand, I'll dive in. If with great disgust or pleasure, the jury is still out.

 

[Brian-M]

You have a real problem: You think that your body is like your car, you put 20 litres of gas, petrol, or the way people call it, and your car weighs 17.5 kg more; you travel a hundred miles, use those 20 litres and your car is again 17.5 kg lighter. No eukaryote functions that way, from amoeba to blue whale, including any biped mammal, skinny or overweighted. I'll come back to this below in this post.

About your plan:

• It doesn't contain the actual diet, so you're setting limits and basically you're just putting the overweighted people's expectations on a diet, not their bodies. Those limits are intended to 75 yo 4f10 grannies as well as 25 yo 6f7 youngsters with a BMI of 40.
• Successful plans with weight goals use bands of weight to avoid the constant changes. If you start, say, with 150 kg, make your first day's goal a weight between 148.4 and 149.9 kg -always your weight when you get up in the morning-. Move the band daily and try to stay in the middle. Start making small changes if you start to get close to one of the limits: don't wait until you're in the upper limit to replace a meal with "diet snacks" -if that is your diet. And don't get greedy and force yourself into "stone skimming" the lower limits. Diets that are just to lose weight are at most a transitory success. Diets that combine losing weight with learning to eat well -and not to live in a permanent state of diet- are more likely to sustain and succeed.
• Don't use targets implying weight loss below 0.5% of your actual weight per week: they fail once you reach what I call "barriers", as they don't have enough momentum to overcome the ways your body uses to avoid "starvation", that is, "diet".
• Your band-less plan is extremely dangerous when you get close to a barrier. The normal adaptation to weight loss -remember that what you want is not what your body wants- is a change in leptin levels with systemic effects on metabolism -by slowing it- and appetite -by becoming ravenous unless ketonic bodies are depressing the centre of appetite-. But to make bad things worse, moving to a lower barrier implies to get rid of a mass of adipocytes and that process has an inflammatory effect, so you may be doing things extremely well and even gain one kilo while you're starving all day long, a resolve-vanishing combination that is behind many people attacking a half-gallon ice-cream bucket or a braised ham, failing their otherwise good diets. You need the band to manage these changes, which also includes your body responding to specific food items and weather changes.

Thanks for the response, and I appreciate the effort you took in writing it.

I didn't specify actual diet because I realize that sticking to a specific range of foods gets boring and unpleasant fairly quickly. The major point of this "diet" is to force people (myself included) to pay closer attention to what they eat and discover for themselves exactly what kinds of foods and quantities of food they can enjoy while they to continue to lose weight. Everybody's different.

I'm not sure if you're responding to my original plan or my revised plan, but in my revised plan I make it clear you can switch between changing rates of weight-loss at any time, which gives people the ability to adapt the plan to their changing needs.

Also, in the revised plan the target is not lowered if you fail to reach it on a specific day, so the plan goes easier on you if you're struggling with it.

Part of the idea is that you can see when your weight is getting close to the limit and respond by deliberately eating a little less today in order to avoid being forced to eat a lot less tomorrow.

I could say a lot more on this, but I want to make clear that you as a person deserve from me and everybody else all the encouragement and support in any diet plan that you may be undertaking. But you can't make from your personal plan a prescription for everybody -as you did- and post in in a forum for dozens of even a few hundred people to read it and yet avoid the harsh criticism your plan deserves. It's a matter of ethics, not idealized ethics, but a practical one: if misleading prescriptions can be avoided by making a through argumentation, harsh criticism and a verbal brawl if circumstances demand, I'll dive in. If with great disgust or pleasure, the jury is still out.

Well, I did post it in a thread that specifically invites criticism, so anyone reading the diet plan can also read any criticism of it as well.