Hello Cong. It is your mortal enemy, BenTheDemon.
Recently in Firebot, I made the announcement that I've started going to therapy, as my anxiety and depression have become too much to bare, but here, I wish to share my next ambition so I will be more motivated.
As many of you may know, my ass is fat. I weigh about 230 pounds, and I am extremely dissatisfied with that. It's not uncommon for me to feel absolutely terrible simply because I don't feel beautiful, and my fat ass is the most obvious factor.
At one time, I weighed 260 pounds, but I suffered terrible depression during that time and lost 30 pounds because eating made me sick to my stomach. I'd prefer not to repeat that, but I'd really like to know the other "secrets" to weight loss that are much less self-harming.
If anyone has any tips to losing weight, please share.
Hopefully I make progress, so I'll try to update this OP periodically with my progress.
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April: 230lbs
I can help you with this. I know how to lose weight, and I've done it more than once in my life. Went from about 250lbs to 200 over the last 6 months of 2016.
There are two things you're going to have to do if you want to lose weight.
1. Counting calories
2. Managing hunger
Number 1 is simple. Losing weight is simply a function of eating less calories than what your body burns in a day. Simply by keeping your heart beating, your diaphragm forcing air in and out of your lungs, and various other bodily functions, you are burning calories. This is called your "basal metabolic rate." Any activity you do in the day that burns calories in the form of exercise or work are added onto this. This total of your BMR and exercise/work is called "caloric maintenance." It's the number of calories you have to eat everyday to maintain your weight. IF you eat more you gain weight, if you eat less, you lose weight! Simple as that.
So to lose weight you NEED and I mean
NEED to count those calories. Im dead fuckin' serious here, you will fail at weight loss without counting. The human brain is so outrageously biased, inaccurate, forgetful, and delusional when it comes to estimating things like this. "Oh I can have this food.. it's only 300 calories!" Your perception of 300 calories is flawed, and you end up overeating. I have done this myself, and I learned that yes counting calories is needed.
Fortunately we live in an age where chances are there's a fucking good piece of software to help you. There is. I personally use "cron-o-meter" because it has a nice browser based and android based app. Lots of people use "myfitnesspal." They're the same thing. You put your sex, bodyweight, and whatever into it, and it gives you your caloric maintenance. You then use the app to log every single thing that you eat. They both have EXTENSIVE food databases that you can search up dang near anything.
So make a calorie goal that's under your daily maintenance. A lot of people do about 500. It's not a terribly difficult number to achieve, and 1lb of fat is equal to 3500 calories, therefore you lose 1lb/week with a -500 calorie deficit. You can do more, or less, just do go crazy. You'll make progress at -300, and it will be easier and slower. Youll make faster progress at -1000, but it will be more difficult, and you might just fail.
Then, log everything you eat! You will have to measure things, this can be tedious, and takes effort but it's NECESSARY and not all that hard. Get a measuring cup and pour your drink into there first, then into the cup you intend to drink it out of.
Get a kitchen scale, they're very cheap, and super easy to use. Put your plate on the scale, hit the zero button, then put your food onto the plate, and then use the weight to log the food you ate into your calorie counter app. Not hard at all, and you'll get very efficient at it.
So that's counting calories. You set a goal, and record your food into your log, making sure you stay under that goal number!! I know what you're thinking. That's it? I can eat whatever and just be under the calorie goal, no problem right? Well there is one thing standing in your way and that is hunger. Hunger is an emotion, it is a drive in your brain to make you eat. People are no in control of their actions when influenced by strong emotions, that is just a basic fact of us that we know and deal with every day.
You have to manage hunger with a few simple dietary rules.
1. Avoid sugar like it is poison. AVOID AVOID AVOID ADDED SUGAR. Im serious. Any food that has sugar
added as an ingredient will just make you hungrier! There is legitimate physiological research and some evolutionary logic behind this. When you eat sugary food your body does not release the hormones that make you feel full. Sugar is a form of carbohydrates that get turned into energy super fast. They are very easy to digest and were rare to the primitive man. Your body tells you to keep eating because it can handle a ton of sugar and make good use of it really fast. You have to avoid sugary foods, because they will just make you hungrier, and you will fail to eat under your caloric maintenance. Cut out soda, candy, chocolate, pastries, nutella, and everything that's super sugary. Soda is the absolute worst, it's just PURE sugar. At least a cake has some protein and more complex carbs in it.. All of this stuff will kill you and make you hungry, but soda is the worst. Foods that naturally have sugar in them like fruit and milk are much, much less deadly to your hunger management, they have different kinds of sugar (lactose, and fructose as well as glucose), fibre, protein and other more satiating molecules.
2. Simple carbs, Sugar part 2. So you know how sugar is really bad for losing weight. Well, here's a shocker. Sugar and Carbs are the some molecule once broken down. Carbs are just glucose (sugar) molecules chained together by a single bond. While there are other sugar molecules like fructose, the previous sentence is a good concept to know. So what the hell, how do you avoid sugar? Simple, carbs have a thing called "glycemic index."
The higher the GI, the faster the carb breaks down in your mouth and stomach, and the faster it can make your hormone levels go crazy. Foods that are still "carbs" but not labeled as sugar on nutrional labels like white pasta, white bread, white rice, and potatoes are still pretty damn close to sugar. They are not as bad as sugar, but again, try and keep your consumption limited.
3. Keep high fat foods on the down low. Fat is not nearly as bad as super sugary foods. First let me get this straight a zero fat diet is a BAD idea your body needs those fat molecules to produce hormones, and other important molecules. However, the thing with fat is that it is DENSE. 1 gram of protein or carbs is 4 calories. 1 gram of fat is 9. That means that high fat foods can be deceptively small! Your stomach has a limited size, it responds to the volume of food that gets put into it. You can get a lot of calories in very fast by eating super high fat foods. Bacon, adding oil to food, fried foods. Avoid these. Like I said, don't completely cut fat out, and you can definitely can get away with foods that are reasonably high in fat concentration, because they don't make your hunger hormones go as whack as sugar, but still, generally avoid greasy foods.
So those are the things to avoid, here's what you should be eating
1. Protein. Protein digests very slowly and makes you feel full. While I don't know all the physiological processes behind this, this is "common wisdom" among those who lose weight, and I've experienced the effect myself. A diet that's higher in lean protein will keep you feeling full and make it easier to achieve your caloric goals.
2. Complex carbs, keep that GI low! Beans, lentils, whole wheat anything, VEGETABLES, oats. These are the kinds of carbs that make you feel damn full. Make these kinds of foods a staple of your diet and you will find weight loss much easier!
So to summarize
- Use a calorie counting app, and set a number of calories to eat every day that's below maintenance
- Measure your food and log it all! Don't think you can get away with not doing this.
- Avoid very high Glycemic index and very high fat foods. Cut these foods out ENTIRELY.
- Don't go crazy, you can still have sugar and fat. Focus more on foods that have these molecules without the need for them to be added though.
If you do these things, I guarantee youll have success in losing weight. IF you are struggling, the advice I can give you is to start slow. Make changes to your lifestyle that are so small that it's almost like nothing changed, keep doing that over time, and eventually you will achieve your goal. If you do a -100 calories/day diet for long enough you will get used to it, then you can go to -200, then -300, and so on. Your body will adjust to a lesser food intake and your cravings for super fatty/sugary foods will decrease as you ween yourself off them.
If youre wondering why I typed all this shit for you, I think it's that truthfully I hate how pervasive obesity it is. It is a sickness, and I dont suffer from it, but I live in a society that does, so it affects me.
