11 ms·

The facts of that study brushed aside: the participants diet was based on potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, bread and macaroni. Notice, not enough protein to mainta

The facts of that study brushed aside: the participants diet was based on potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, bread and macaroni. Notice, not enough protein to maintain lean body mass. This is a bad idea. Also, over 24 weeks the group lost 25% of their body mass. Look at pictures of the participants: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25782294 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25782294 These look like frail bodys that, indeed, can sustain on 1600 calories per day, which explains slowed weight loss. If you're an individual looking at how to seriously lose fat and recompose your body, don't look at popular media, but look at those with vested interest in effective results. E.g. athletic trainers in sports where weight management is a key point of the sport, like bodybuilding, wrestling, MMA, powerlifting. The science is quite clear, you just have to figure out how to filter out popular articles. (Lyle McDonald's site is a great start.) Calorie restriction, with adequate protein intake, works. Also, any diet or lifestyle change that works creates a caloric deficit, and will also work if you count this deficit.

mistermann 11y ago
My wife has been failing to lose weight for several months, she is literally weighing everything she eats and recording calories (~1200/day), plus doing a several hours of quite intense exercise (stairs, etc) per week yet has hit a plateau for well over a month - any advice, things to read? (Note: she "can't" do low carb, which I personally recommend.)
- x0x0 11y ago
  If you've ruled out what is (imo) likely to be the most effective method, I'm not sure what results you expect. As gp suggested, you all should start with McDonald's book _The Ketogenic Diet_. I'm not saying it's gospel, but it's a start and it's one of the diets used by strength sports to control weight. There's lots and lots of arguing over this, but it's hard to dispute that many athletes use the ketogenic or similar diets to lose anywhere from 10 to 30 lbs of fat relatively quickly. http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/the-ketogenic-diet/ http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/the-ketogenic-diet/
- stone-monkey 11y ago
  I watched a documentary that talked about the Minnesota experiment and plateaus were also common despite the fact that participants were being fed insufficient calories. They had weird issues with their bodies like edema in their feet. Eventually, they found out that having a large meal occasionally would cause them to break through the plateau for reasons I forget.
- Jedd 11y ago
  Can you answer a) what 'can't' means quoted, b) current body fat (or at least where she is on the graph), and c) whether you have a decent set of scales (which will answer b). With (a) -- the 'slow carb' thing popularised by Tim Ferris in The Four Hour Body was easy to stick to, had some good science behind it, and most importantly was clearly successful for many people. With (b) -- there's an effective asymptote which makes it hard to shift the 'last bit' - though it sounds like she's not at that point. With (c) -- without an accurate measure of body fat & muscle percentages it's basically blowing in the wind as you experiment with changes in your diet. And, lots of exercise - building muscle - will add more mass over the same volume of fat, of course. While carefully weighing food may work for some people, I think if it's not working after several months then you are obliged to accept it doesn't work in this case. Has she consulted a GP? It's possible there's a metabolic problem (statistically unlikely, but possible).
  - mistermann 11y ago
    For "can't", I think it's too emotionally draining for her, which is often followed by physical manifestations of pain. It seems to be a tough diet if you don't have the right mindset. I'll look into the "slow carb" thing though. She hasn't consulted a GP, I highly doubt it's any sort of a metabolic anomaly, beyond just that which comes from aging.
    - Jedd 11y ago
      Okay. Personally I'd find it hugely more draining to be tracking and worrying about volume / mass of every bit of food I ate. 4HB - go buy / borrow a copy, and read the first fifth or so (that's the bit about diet and weight management - there may be some useful stuff regarding exercise in the latter sections for your wife, by the sounds of it). Basics are: drink more water, reduce your salt intake, cut out starch (the 'avoid anything white' rule of thumb), eat much more (seriously) food to compensate for lack of starch / carbohydrates - often up to three times the mass of what you'd be eating previously, eat (lots of!) beans - they have some carbohydrate component, but often locked up or less digestible, and they're a cheap, nutritious, environmentally-friendly versatile food, monitor your weight very carefully, don't fret about fat (but watch out for fatty foods that contain lots of salt), have a high protein breakfast early, say with 30-60m of waking, and one day a week eat however much you like of whatever you like at lunch & dinner. That last thing is what makes it a particularly palatable (ha ha) and sustainable diet for many people. To be candid I've never felt any aspect of it was especially tough - there's the social outings that may complicate things, but that's the same problem for anyone considering what they eat. Good luck. : )
- mikekchar 11y ago
  Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, nor a dietician. I am the type of person who finds it easy to gain weight or lose weight if I put my mind to it. Interestingly, I have helped friends lose weight by doing what I do. Y(W)MMV. Depending on the size of your wife, I think that 1200 calories per day is too low. In fact, when I have crunched the numbers with nutritional software (http://nut.sourceforge.net/ http://nut.sourceforge.net/ absolutely worst UI in the history of the universe, but otherwise excellent), it is really, really difficult to balance nutrition on less than about 1600 calories a day. Potentially, you could do it with supplements, but eating a realistic diet that you can maintain is very important for improving your lifestyle (in my opinion). My advice is to up the calorie intake in order to improve nutrition and correspondingly up exercise levels. You say she has several hours of exercise per week. I assume that means that she is exercising a few times a week. It would be much better to exercise 6 days a week (taking one day off for rest). Intensity of exercise is important. If the intensity is too high, you will run out of sugar. If your goal is long term energy expenditure, then lower intensity for longer times is much, much better. Unfortunately, I don't have time to find you some links, but do a google search for graphs of percentage of sugar vs fat against exercise time. It depends on the person (especially how fit you are already), but essentially the body starts out burning sugar and slowly starts using fat in preference. Generally speaking it takes about 30 minutes before you are burning 50:50. So if you do 15 minutes of intense exercise - to the point where you can't continue any more - you will have depleted your sugar resources. This impairs your body's ability to power itself for the rest of the day. Much better is to lower the intensity so that you can do 30-60 minutes of activity. This will spare the sugar in your body, while burning calories (from fat). Also, fat has nearly a 4:1 energy density advantage over sugar so you should find that the exercise is more enjoyable and your performance is much higher. In fact, a good 20 minute warmup to get the blood flowing and the muscles working, followed by a good workout will do wonders for you. The level of intensity is quite important (and is something that I personally have difficulty with because I always train too hard). For the past 10 years or so, I've been doing cycling. At first I was riding hard for about an hour every day, to the point where I collapse at the end of the ride. My wife wanted to ride with me, so 3 or 4 days a week, I had to go at her pace. We still did an hour a day, but at a really slow pace. After a month or two, I could not believe the difference in my performance. It just sky rocketted. There are many scholarly papers on the topic which you can search for, but the old advice of doing base miles seems to work extremely well (at least for me). The idea is to maintain a level of exertion where you are slightly out of breath (have to breathe through your mouth), but that you can have a conversation easily. As far as I can tell, it literally doesn't matter what exercise you do, as long as you keep to that rule. Obviously, 6 hours of exercise a week is a lot and it is hard to organise your life around it. However, 6 days a week is much, much easier than 3 or 4 days a week because it forces you to not be flexible with it. You must plan for it and make sacrifices. In my experience (you might be different), trying to add exercise (or anything else) to your life while avoiding impact to your life just means that you will be inconsistent. Take the hit up front and make it a priority. After that things just get easier. The other way around just stays difficult for ever. Another important thing is to pick something that you enjoy. I used to run and if I took too much time off, I would always find that the first 2 weeks of getting back to it were hellish. After that, I would fall in love with it again, so sometimes you just need to persevere even if you don't think you are enjoying it. However, with cycling, it doesn't matter how long I've been away, I love it from the first down stroke of the pedal. If you don't enjoy what you are doing, keep searching for something that you do enjoy. It's going to be a big part of your life. The number of calories you burn depends greatly on the sport you do, but I think a good rule of thumb is that you will be burning about 5-600 calories per hour. My wife just handed me one of those 1/3 sized cans of Pringles chips. There are 61 grams of chips in the can comprising 316 calories. I can easily eat this can of chips without even remembering I did so (wiping out half of my hour of exercise). If you always look at labels and think 100 calories is 10 minutes of exercise, it hits home. In fact, go to a Seven Eleven and look at the labels on things. Can you even buy a snack that has less than 100 calories? As for food composition, I'm afraid to say that I think people are over-optimising on the wrong thing. Whether or not low carb is effective, I don't know, but none of the people who have followed my advice has ever failed to lose whatever weight they wanted (see disclaimer below!). If you must obsess with what you are eating, I would err on the side of reducing fat. Again, the calorie density thing means that if I'm eating lower fat, I get to eat more volume. For exercise, I firmly believe in sparing sugar, and I can't imagine any low carb diet would perform well for endurance sports. One last piece of advice: don't try to lose weight too fast. Absolute max in my opinion is about 1 kg per week (about 2 pounds). Honestly, I would dial that back to 500 grams per week because it just seems healthier from my experience. If you do this for only 1 year, you will lose between 25-50 kg. That is a crazy amount of weight (and you will already have a lot of loose skin that won't rebound in that amount of time!). If you think, "I don't want to wait a year", then my experience is that you will fail anyway. It's not about the goal, it's about the journey. Without experiencing that journey, the goal will disappear. Find a way to enjoy it -- it's the only way. One more disclaimer: if you need to lose more than 20-50kg, don't follow my advice. Seek a professional and get qualified advice. Random people on the internet are not qualified to help you (myself included).
- simplexion 11y ago
  Bullshit. This is 100% bullshit. If she is on ~1200/day she would be losing weight. That is how physics works. My advice is stop lying or tell your wife to stop lying.
  - mistermann 11y ago
    You would think so, but the "weight loss = calories in - calories out" is far too simplistic to describe the real world.
    - simplexion 11y ago
      No. It is exactly how to describe it. Energy in vs energy out.
      - mistermann 11y ago
        It ignores metabolism, there is evidence that the presence (or lack of) certain enzymes in the digestive system can drastically affect ability to absorb calories, etc. It is too simplistic to explain reality.
        simplexion 11y ago
        It really is not.
        mistermann 11y ago
        Just for fun, I'll paste my reply to another comment here: Do you genuinely believe that metabolism doesn't vary across individuals, or for an individual over time? Do you think the bodies of all individuals have precisely the same ability to both absorb calories from ingested food, as well as produce motion with the exact same efficiency? Do you believe enzymes present in the digestive system have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the calories in / calories out calculations? Do you think every calorie you put into your body is converted into energy? I'll add an extra one for you: in controlled lab tests, would all subjects lose weight precisely as predicted by a formula that considered their diet and physical activity?
- grecy 11y ago
  Are you 100% certain your wife is only consuming ~1200/cals a day? Many people drink a lot of calories per day (could be soda, fruit juice or alcohol) without realizing it, and many people sneak small items and lie about it too. Aside from that, based on your wife's age, weight and height, what's her recommended stable calorie intake per day? I would recommend only going a few hundred below that to lose weight, as other comments have said, the body can react very strangely if you restrict too much - it thinks it's starving.
  - mistermann 11y ago
    > Many people drink a lot of calories per day (could be soda, fruit juice or alcohol) without realizing it, and many people sneak small items and lie about it too. She's been guilty of cheating in the past, but I'm quite sure she's not this time. Her trainer says target 1400 calories but she's been doing 1200, which seems reasonable to me, but maybe that's too low and kicking the body into self-preservation mode.
    - grecy 11y ago
      > Her trainer says target 1400 calories That sounds very low. Can you please tell me what this says based on her stats? http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/calorie-calculator/itt-20084939 http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-he... (I'm not saying that calculator is a good one or anything, I'm just curious if it says anything near 1400)
      - mistermann 11y ago
        I will check. Just ran it for myself and it told me 2000 calories, waaaaay more than I would have expected.
        grecy 11y ago
        Yeah, it seemed really high for me (2800) too. I've always figured at my current weight I'm closer to 2500 to maintain.
- c0riander 11y ago
  If your wife has been in caloric restriction for an extended period of time, she may have metabolic damage. I recently stumbled upon Layne Norton's work - he has a PhD in Nutritional Science and is a bodybuilder/powerlifter, and he makes some compelling arguments (and reviews of the literature) about how the metabolism responds to prolonged caloric restriction. Here's a good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHHzie6XRGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHHzie6XRGk
  - mistermann 11y ago
    Interesting....again, this all sounds plausible, but is also contradictory with other perfectly plausible theories, some even in this same thread (whether low intensity cardio is good or bad). Considering the plateau my wife's hit, I think maybe this is an avenue worth exploring though. She'll certainly be open to the idea of consuming more calories! You know one thing that sucks, I would be not at all surprised if the average personal trainer at a gym hardly has a clue what they're talking about, not to mention the theoretical approach they subscribe to might not even be correct.
  - leshow 11y ago
    Metabolic damage is an overused term that layne has been pushing for a long time and makes a lot of money off of. I encourage you to read alan aragon's research review so you can see real research and how full of shit the whole 'metabolic damage' thing really is.
- frankzinger 11y ago
  I've heard that plateauing is normal and that the solution is to increase the caloric deficit. If you're going to lose a lot of weight you'll hit a number of plateaus. But as others have pointed out, 1200 calories sounds like a massive deficit. For the average, moderately active woman (requiring 2,000kcal per day) that would be a deficit of 800kcal, obviously way too high. I've seen 3.2kcal/lbs or 7kcal/kg of bodyweight recommended as a good deficit, which equates to 420kcal for a 60kg/132lbs person. As somebody else said, are you sure you haven't make a mistake in the calculations? This is very common mistake. I think https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/wiki/faq#wiki_diet_details https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/wiki/faq#wiki_diet_details is a good starting point for more information, and then the whole of /r/fitness for more specific answers.
  - leshow 11y ago
    There are vast differences in caloric requirements between individuals. While I agree starting with an 800 cal deficit is severe; unless the woman had been tracking her food consistently and remaining weight stable you've know way to know if that was the actual amount of deficit she was in or not. As a competing bodybuilder that has gotten to the extreme lows of body fat multiple times, I can say the best strategy is to just always be in a moderate deficit and diet for long periods. for example, start with a 100 calorie deficit, when you've stopped losing weight (because you have less body mass and thus a lower maintenance intake), cut another 100 calories or so. This way you're never in more than a 100 calorie deficit for the duration of the diet. It's a mistake to make assumptions about her maintenance intake and assume she's in an 800 calorie deficit. If she was she'd be losing weight very very quickly.
    - frankzinger 11y ago
      It's a mistake to make assumptions about her maintenance intake and assume she's in an 800 calorie deficit. Agreed, but I think it was quite clear that I was speaking about a hypothetical person when I said "For the average, moderately active woman (requiring 2,000kcal per day) that would be a deficit of 800kcal" (emphasis added). If she was she'd be losing weight very very quickly. That's why I suggested re-checking their calculations.
ivanhoe 11y ago
Actually it's a huge mistake for amateurs to try to follow top athletes' training routine or diet. They have a different starting position, capabilities, and completely different goals. One thing that non-obese people just can't seem to understand when discussing diets is that it's not the same to loose a few pounds before summer and to spend 3-4 years dieting and changing your deeply hard-coded lifestyle in order to loose half of your weight or more. With obese people right mindset and self-discipline plays a huge rule, that's where most people fail. It's extremely hard and demanding to follow the strict behavioral rules for years and it's much bigger problem than just counting calories.
- CyberDildonics 11y ago
  An even bigger problem is that obese people don't understand what will get them thin because conventional wisdom is a poor approach. Cut way back on fructose, eat way more fiber, fat, and protein. That alone is huge. Want to go faster? Cut down artificial sweeteners and drink water (or something unsweetened). Want to go even faster? Do intense workouts twice a week. You don't have to run, don't have to spend a long time, but you do need to exhaust your major muscle groups. Then your body has no choice but to recharge and heal your muscles, which it will do by mobilizing fat. An obese person following this can lose 5 pounds per week and not be hungry, although the craving for sugar in the first week or two will be akin to fighting a genuine addiction.
  - leshow 11y ago
    The overwhelming body of evidence suggests that sugar-free sweeteners absolutely don't cause fat gain, and that increasing water consumption has no affect on fat loss. Your body has a well regulated mechanism of telling you when you need water; it's called thirst. Your advice on cutting back on fructose and eating more fibre fat and protein, without mentioning that you have to also be in a caloric deficit is a huge oversight. If my maintenance caloric intake is 2k cals per day and I change the macronutrient ratio I'm consuming but not the overall calories, I likely won't experience any weight loss except a small amount from thermic effect of feeding related to protein consumption. You absolutely need to be in a caloric deficit to lose weight, and fructose is satan in disguise that's going to mess up your weight loss goals.
superuser2 11y ago
People generally want to lose weight to be happier in some way, feel better about themselves and their value on the dating market, etc. not as an end in itself. If you swap negative feelings about your body for constant hunger, you're not improving the situation. And personally, I'd take the self-esteem issues. You can at least make an attempt to talk and think yourself out of that box. Hunger is a deep, primal thing that can't really be addressed by a therapist or tuned out by reading a good book.

mistermann 11y ago

My wife has been failing to lose weight for several months, she is literally weighing everything she eats and recording calories (~1200/day), plus doing a several hours of quite intense exercise (stairs, etc) per week yet has hit a plateau for well over a month - any advice, things to read? (Note: she "can't" do low carb, which I personally recommend.)

x0x0 11y ago
If you've ruled out what is (imo) likely to be the most effective method, I'm not sure what results you expect. As gp suggested, you all should start with McDonald's book _The Ketogenic Diet_. I'm not saying it's gospel, but it's a start and it's one of the diets used by strength sports to control weight. There's lots and lots of arguing over this, but it's hard to dispute that many athletes use the ketogenic or similar diets to lose anywhere from 10 to 30 lbs of fat relatively quickly. http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/the-ketogenic-diet/ http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/the-ketogenic-diet/
stone-monkey 11y ago
I watched a documentary that talked about the Minnesota experiment and plateaus were also common despite the fact that participants were being fed insufficient calories. They had weird issues with their bodies like edema in their feet. Eventually, they found out that having a large meal occasionally would cause them to break through the plateau for reasons I forget.
Jedd 11y ago
Can you answer a) what 'can't' means quoted, b) current body fat (or at least where she is on the graph), and c) whether you have a decent set of scales (which will answer b). With (a) -- the 'slow carb' thing popularised by Tim Ferris in The Four Hour Body was easy to stick to, had some good science behind it, and most importantly was clearly successful for many people. With (b) -- there's an effective asymptote which makes it hard to shift the 'last bit' - though it sounds like she's not at that point. With (c) -- without an accurate measure of body fat & muscle percentages it's basically blowing in the wind as you experiment with changes in your diet. And, lots of exercise - building muscle - will add more mass over the same volume of fat, of course. While carefully weighing food may work for some people, I think if it's not working after several months then you are obliged to accept it doesn't work in this case. Has she consulted a GP? It's possible there's a metabolic problem (statistically unlikely, but possible).
- mistermann 11y ago
  For "can't", I think it's too emotionally draining for her, which is often followed by physical manifestations of pain. It seems to be a tough diet if you don't have the right mindset. I'll look into the "slow carb" thing though. She hasn't consulted a GP, I highly doubt it's any sort of a metabolic anomaly, beyond just that which comes from aging.
  - Jedd 11y ago
    Okay. Personally I'd find it hugely more draining to be tracking and worrying about volume / mass of every bit of food I ate. 4HB - go buy / borrow a copy, and read the first fifth or so (that's the bit about diet and weight management - there may be some useful stuff regarding exercise in the latter sections for your wife, by the sounds of it). Basics are: drink more water, reduce your salt intake, cut out starch (the 'avoid anything white' rule of thumb), eat much more (seriously) food to compensate for lack of starch / carbohydrates - often up to three times the mass of what you'd be eating previously, eat (lots of!) beans - they have some carbohydrate component, but often locked up or less digestible, and they're a cheap, nutritious, environmentally-friendly versatile food, monitor your weight very carefully, don't fret about fat (but watch out for fatty foods that contain lots of salt), have a high protein breakfast early, say with 30-60m of waking, and one day a week eat however much you like of whatever you like at lunch & dinner. That last thing is what makes it a particularly palatable (ha ha) and sustainable diet for many people. To be candid I've never felt any aspect of it was especially tough - there's the social outings that may complicate things, but that's the same problem for anyone considering what they eat. Good luck. : )
mikekchar 11y ago
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, nor a dietician. I am the type of person who finds it easy to gain weight or lose weight if I put my mind to it. Interestingly, I have helped friends lose weight by doing what I do. Y(W)MMV. Depending on the size of your wife, I think that 1200 calories per day is too low. In fact, when I have crunched the numbers with nutritional software (http://nut.sourceforge.net/ http://nut.sourceforge.net/ absolutely worst UI in the history of the universe, but otherwise excellent), it is really, really difficult to balance nutrition on less than about 1600 calories a day. Potentially, you could do it with supplements, but eating a realistic diet that you can maintain is very important for improving your lifestyle (in my opinion). My advice is to up the calorie intake in order to improve nutrition and correspondingly up exercise levels. You say she has several hours of exercise per week. I assume that means that she is exercising a few times a week. It would be much better to exercise 6 days a week (taking one day off for rest). Intensity of exercise is important. If the intensity is too high, you will run out of sugar. If your goal is long term energy expenditure, then lower intensity for longer times is much, much better. Unfortunately, I don't have time to find you some links, but do a google search for graphs of percentage of sugar vs fat against exercise time. It depends on the person (especially how fit you are already), but essentially the body starts out burning sugar and slowly starts using fat in preference. Generally speaking it takes about 30 minutes before you are burning 50:50. So if you do 15 minutes of intense exercise - to the point where you can't continue any more - you will have depleted your sugar resources. This impairs your body's ability to power itself for the rest of the day. Much better is to lower the intensity so that you can do 30-60 minutes of activity. This will spare the sugar in your body, while burning calories (from fat). Also, fat has nearly a 4:1 energy density advantage over sugar so you should find that the exercise is more enjoyable and your performance is much higher. In fact, a good 20 minute warmup to get the blood flowing and the muscles working, followed by a good workout will do wonders for you. The level of intensity is quite important (and is something that I personally have difficulty with because I always train too hard). For the past 10 years or so, I've been doing cycling. At first I was riding hard for about an hour every day, to the point where I collapse at the end of the ride. My wife wanted to ride with me, so 3 or 4 days a week, I had to go at her pace. We still did an hour a day, but at a really slow pace. After a month or two, I could not believe the difference in my performance. It just sky rocketted. There are many scholarly papers on the topic which you can search for, but the old advice of doing base miles seems to work extremely well (at least for me). The idea is to maintain a level of exertion where you are slightly out of breath (have to breathe through your mouth), but that you can have a conversation easily. As far as I can tell, it literally doesn't matter what exercise you do, as long as you keep to that rule. Obviously, 6 hours of exercise a week is a lot and it is hard to organise your life around it. However, 6 days a week is much, much easier than 3 or 4 days a week because it forces you to not be flexible with it. You must plan for it and make sacrifices. In my experience (you might be different), trying to add exercise (or anything else) to your life while avoiding impact to your life just means that you will be inconsistent. Take the hit up front and make it a priority. After that things just get easier. The other way around just stays difficult for ever. Another important thing is to pick something that you enjoy. I used to run and if I took too much time off, I would always find that the first 2 weeks of getting back to it were hellish. After that, I would fall in love with it again, so sometimes you just need to persevere even if you don't think you are enjoying it. However, with cycling, it doesn't matter how long I've been away, I love it from the first down stroke of the pedal. If you don't enjoy what you are doing, keep searching for something that you do enjoy. It's going to be a big part of your life. The number of calories you burn depends greatly on the sport you do, but I think a good rule of thumb is that you will be burning about 5-600 calories per hour. My wife just handed me one of those 1/3 sized cans of Pringles chips. There are 61 grams of chips in the can comprising 316 calories. I can easily eat this can of chips without even remembering I did so (wiping out half of my hour of exercise). If you always look at labels and think 100 calories is 10 minutes of exercise, it hits home. In fact, go to a Seven Eleven and look at the labels on things. Can you even buy a snack that has less than 100 calories? As for food composition, I'm afraid to say that I think people are over-optimising on the wrong thing. Whether or not low carb is effective, I don't know, but none of the people who have followed my advice has ever failed to lose whatever weight they wanted (see disclaimer below!). If you must obsess with what you are eating, I would err on the side of reducing fat. Again, the calorie density thing means that if I'm eating lower fat, I get to eat more volume. For exercise, I firmly believe in sparing sugar, and I can't imagine any low carb diet would perform well for endurance sports. One last piece of advice: don't try to lose weight too fast. Absolute max in my opinion is about 1 kg per week (about 2 pounds). Honestly, I would dial that back to 500 grams per week because it just seems healthier from my experience. If you do this for only 1 year, you will lose between 25-50 kg. That is a crazy amount of weight (and you will already have a lot of loose skin that won't rebound in that amount of time!). If you think, "I don't want to wait a year", then my experience is that you will fail anyway. It's not about the goal, it's about the journey. Without experiencing that journey, the goal will disappear. Find a way to enjoy it -- it's the only way. One more disclaimer: if you need to lose more than 20-50kg, don't follow my advice. Seek a professional and get qualified advice. Random people on the internet are not qualified to help you (myself included).
simplexion 11y ago
Bullshit. This is 100% bullshit. If she is on ~1200/day she would be losing weight. That is how physics works. My advice is stop lying or tell your wife to stop lying.
- mistermann 11y ago
  You would think so, but the "weight loss = calories in - calories out" is far too simplistic to describe the real world.
  - simplexion 11y ago
    No. It is exactly how to describe it. Energy in vs energy out.
    - mistermann 11y ago
      It ignores metabolism, there is evidence that the presence (or lack of) certain enzymes in the digestive system can drastically affect ability to absorb calories, etc. It is too simplistic to explain reality.
      - simplexion 11y ago
        It really is not.
        mistermann 11y ago
        Just for fun, I'll paste my reply to another comment here: Do you genuinely believe that metabolism doesn't vary across individuals, or for an individual over time? Do you think the bodies of all individuals have precisely the same ability to both absorb calories from ingested food, as well as produce motion with the exact same efficiency? Do you believe enzymes present in the digestive system have absolutely no effect whatsoever on the calories in / calories out calculations? Do you think every calorie you put into your body is converted into energy? I'll add an extra one for you: in controlled lab tests, would all subjects lose weight precisely as predicted by a formula that considered their diet and physical activity?
grecy 11y ago
Are you 100% certain your wife is only consuming ~1200/cals a day? Many people drink a lot of calories per day (could be soda, fruit juice or alcohol) without realizing it, and many people sneak small items and lie about it too. Aside from that, based on your wife's age, weight and height, what's her recommended stable calorie intake per day? I would recommend only going a few hundred below that to lose weight, as other comments have said, the body can react very strangely if you restrict too much - it thinks it's starving.
- mistermann 11y ago
  > Many people drink a lot of calories per day (could be soda, fruit juice or alcohol) without realizing it, and many people sneak small items and lie about it too. She's been guilty of cheating in the past, but I'm quite sure she's not this time. Her trainer says target 1400 calories but she's been doing 1200, which seems reasonable to me, but maybe that's too low and kicking the body into self-preservation mode.
  - grecy 11y ago
    > Her trainer says target 1400 calories That sounds very low. Can you please tell me what this says based on her stats? http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/in-depth/calorie-calculator/itt-20084939 http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-he... (I'm not saying that calculator is a good one or anything, I'm just curious if it says anything near 1400)
    - mistermann 11y ago
      I will check. Just ran it for myself and it told me 2000 calories, waaaaay more than I would have expected.
      - grecy 11y ago
        Yeah, it seemed really high for me (2800) too. I've always figured at my current weight I'm closer to 2500 to maintain.
c0riander 11y ago
If your wife has been in caloric restriction for an extended period of time, she may have metabolic damage. I recently stumbled upon Layne Norton's work - he has a PhD in Nutritional Science and is a bodybuilder/powerlifter, and he makes some compelling arguments (and reviews of the literature) about how the metabolism responds to prolonged caloric restriction. Here's a good place to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHHzie6XRGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHHzie6XRGk
- mistermann 11y ago
  Interesting....again, this all sounds plausible, but is also contradictory with other perfectly plausible theories, some even in this same thread (whether low intensity cardio is good or bad). Considering the plateau my wife's hit, I think maybe this is an avenue worth exploring though. She'll certainly be open to the idea of consuming more calories! You know one thing that sucks, I would be not at all surprised if the average personal trainer at a gym hardly has a clue what they're talking about, not to mention the theoretical approach they subscribe to might not even be correct.
- leshow 11y ago
  Metabolic damage is an overused term that layne has been pushing for a long time and makes a lot of money off of. I encourage you to read alan aragon's research review so you can see real research and how full of shit the whole 'metabolic damage' thing really is.
frankzinger 11y ago
I've heard that plateauing is normal and that the solution is to increase the caloric deficit. If you're going to lose a lot of weight you'll hit a number of plateaus. But as others have pointed out, 1200 calories sounds like a massive deficit. For the average, moderately active woman (requiring 2,000kcal per day) that would be a deficit of 800kcal, obviously way too high. I've seen 3.2kcal/lbs or 7kcal/kg of bodyweight recommended as a good deficit, which equates to 420kcal for a 60kg/132lbs person. As somebody else said, are you sure you haven't make a mistake in the calculations? This is very common mistake. I think https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/wiki/faq#wiki_diet_details https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/wiki/faq#wiki_diet_details is a good starting point for more information, and then the whole of /r/fitness for more specific answers.
- leshow 11y ago
  There are vast differences in caloric requirements between individuals. While I agree starting with an 800 cal deficit is severe; unless the woman had been tracking her food consistently and remaining weight stable you've know way to know if that was the actual amount of deficit she was in or not. As a competing bodybuilder that has gotten to the extreme lows of body fat multiple times, I can say the best strategy is to just always be in a moderate deficit and diet for long periods. for example, start with a 100 calorie deficit, when you've stopped losing weight (because you have less body mass and thus a lower maintenance intake), cut another 100 calories or so. This way you're never in more than a 100 calorie deficit for the duration of the diet. It's a mistake to make assumptions about her maintenance intake and assume she's in an 800 calorie deficit. If she was she'd be losing weight very very quickly.
  - frankzinger 11y ago
    It's a mistake to make assumptions about her maintenance intake and assume she's in an 800 calorie deficit. Agreed, but I think it was quite clear that I was speaking about a hypothetical person when I said "For the average, moderately active woman (requiring 2,000kcal per day) that would be a deficit of 800kcal" (emphasis added). If she was she'd be losing weight very very quickly. That's why I suggested re-checking their calculations.

ivanhoe 11y ago

Actually it's a huge mistake for amateurs to try to follow top athletes' training routine or diet. They have a different starting position, capabilities, and completely different goals. One thing that non-obese people just can't seem to understand when discussing diets is that it's not the same to loose a few pounds before summer and to spend 3-4 years dieting and changing your deeply hard-coded lifestyle in order to loose half of your weight or more. With obese people right mindset and self-discipline plays a huge rule, that's where most people fail. It's extremely hard and demanding to follow the strict behavioral rules for years and it's much bigger problem than just counting calories.

CyberDildonics 11y ago
An even bigger problem is that obese people don't understand what will get them thin because conventional wisdom is a poor approach. Cut way back on fructose, eat way more fiber, fat, and protein. That alone is huge. Want to go faster? Cut down artificial sweeteners and drink water (or something unsweetened). Want to go even faster? Do intense workouts twice a week. You don't have to run, don't have to spend a long time, but you do need to exhaust your major muscle groups. Then your body has no choice but to recharge and heal your muscles, which it will do by mobilizing fat. An obese person following this can lose 5 pounds per week and not be hungry, although the craving for sugar in the first week or two will be akin to fighting a genuine addiction.
- leshow 11y ago
  The overwhelming body of evidence suggests that sugar-free sweeteners absolutely don't cause fat gain, and that increasing water consumption has no affect on fat loss. Your body has a well regulated mechanism of telling you when you need water; it's called thirst. Your advice on cutting back on fructose and eating more fibre fat and protein, without mentioning that you have to also be in a caloric deficit is a huge oversight. If my maintenance caloric intake is 2k cals per day and I change the macronutrient ratio I'm consuming but not the overall calories, I likely won't experience any weight loss except a small amount from thermic effect of feeding related to protein consumption. You absolutely need to be in a caloric deficit to lose weight, and fructose is satan in disguise that's going to mess up your weight loss goals.

superuser2 11y ago

People generally want to lose weight to be happier in some way, feel better about themselves and their value on the dating market, etc. not as an end in itself. If you swap negative feelings about your body for constant hunger, you're not improving the situation. And personally, I'd take the self-esteem issues. You can at least make an attempt to talk and think yourself out of that box. Hunger is a deep, primal thing that can't really be addressed by a therapist or tuned out by reading a good book.