Diet...do or don't?

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  • I'm lucky, no children in the house, hubby's mostly away during the week, and the freezers are full of dog food (we feed raw meat and bones). I rarely buy snack foods or chocolate, I should be stick thin but........
  • I am gobsmacked, R4YL - I think you challenge Beth in the "Got this diet thing sorted" stakes! Amazed that you manage to keep such a detailed diary of your diet and exercise - but it has obviously worked for you.

    Sometimes it is necessary to have that sort of determination to lose weight, and to be prepared almost to make an obsession of it, because we live in a world where there is so much pressure upon us NOT to eat healthily and NOT to exercise. If someone decided to take the broad easy road rather than the little uphill track, I can respect that entirely but my respect always comes with a caveat - "If you choose not to lose weight and do some exercise, you WILL keep getting those back and knee pains/develop diabetes like your mother and granny did/have a higher risk of dying under the anaesthetic when you have your gallbladder out/need pills for your blood pressure and cholesterol...". In fact, it's a bit like the achilles tendon situation in your other post - I can't warn them of everything that might go wrong, there's too much.

  • glad i'm not the only one who writes down everything i eat!....until a few months ago, i was still trying (unrealistically and definitely unnecessarily) to lose another half a stone, and found that my body wasn't responding to anything but the kind of calorie restriction you can't run on , and soon went back to the same weight after resuming 'normal' eating...now i know far too much about food and calories (i have a veritable database after years of eating disorders!) and my body was beating it all....then i realised i'd found my set point....ok, that set point would be much much higher if i didn't run so much, but i'd still found it.....i 've started eating a lot more these days....some is fuel, and some probably comfort eating, but i'm not actually putting on weight....my body is winning there too....just think it's all pretty amazing....
    i still have a lot of problems with food, and writing down what i eat is a really good way of a healthy control....i'm not always comfortable with the amount of food i have to eat for fuel, and then sometimes it turns into a binge, bringing back all the nasty old habits and thoughts....odd logic, eh, but it happens!
    but now i've realised i like my weight, my running comes first.....and it's getting better too, i think (tentatively!)
    talking of which.....better go out so i'll be back for east enders ....i started going to night school a few weeks ago to do some more a levels so i can apply to med school....the result being that i miss east enders in the week.....well that's sunday afternoon sorted ;)
  • Fluffa, go for it! Med school rocks. From the little I know, I think you'd be great - lots of things you could already bring insights into from your personal experience, and even more different areas to fall in love with and decide that's what you've been waiting for all your life.

    I have a lot of bother with the fact that people seem to think I can be persuaded that their bodies defy the laws of physics - what I call the "half of one chapatti and a spoonful of dahl" syndrome because my diabetic clinics are full of five foot nothing, 15 stone ladies who claim to eat precisely that amount every 24 hours. I cannot get my head round the idea that you can make fat out of food you're not eating. My community dietitian panders to the same myth by telling people that they're overweight because they don't eat enough.

    On the other hand, I was mightily surprised to find that my own body seemed to be defying the law of conservation of matter when I was marathon-training. At about 7.5 stone (I'm a shortie so that's bang in the middle of my "ideal" running weight range, although it feels bloody skinny to me) with a body fat of about 20%, and running 30-40 miles a week, the calculations suggested that I should need about 2,800 calories a day to maintain my weight, but I was packing in 3,500 and my weight was slipping downwards. There wasn't anything wrong with me, because when I stopped exercising so hard I got ravenous and ate non-stop until getting back up to my normal weight, when it became safe to leave food unattended in my presence again. It didn't seem to make sense until I came across an article about how strenuous exercise can make some people produce a hormone related to the one that causes torrential weight loss in conditions such as heart failure and some cancers. Scay-ree!

    But that was serious mileage. For someone with a thrifty gene, modest exercise is likely to lead to a compensatory increase in appetite unless they actively make healthy food choices and try to eat less overall, however that reduction is dressed up. Even so, for overall health it's better to be active and a bit podgy than a skinny sofa-spud.
  • hey thanks for the encouragement about med school...i''m aiming to be filling in forms in a year's time, and hopefully try for one of the graduate entry courses....in the meantime i've got some therapy to finish, and i want to work as a nursing assistant in a psychiatric unit to get some experience with real people....long haul, but you never know!
    i've got a meeting on friday with the medical admissions person at the mature students' college at my old uni to have a chat about the right strategy etc...so here goes!
    i know what you mean about conservation of matter ....if i eat normally (and here i mean normally and generously!) i can't sleep as i get so damn hungry....i know when i haven't eaten enough as i dream about crispy loaves of bread and chocolate.....just wish i had the attitude where i could really listen to my body instead of worrying whether i've cut the loaf 'precisely' in half and get really stressed that i haven't.....but i really find i need more than the charts say...i'm supposed to need about 1500 cal to live, and probably another 600 or so for exercise, and it just doesn't work...no idea why, i just put it down to some kind of massive afterburn effect... i'm right at my racing weight, i think (5'4.5 and 8'1) and my body likes it as it is, though i don't have much in the way of fat ...(i realised this when i was giving my partner a massage! ...so these are normal shoulders !)
    i heard that set points vary with activity level, and this makes sense, as i remember when i was 15 and carefree i was always 10 stone no matter how much i ate....shortly after that i turned into
    a bit of an idiot and a nutritional contortionist.....
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