... to tell you that diets don't work for everyone

[Wroxie]

Today is my 9 month anniversary of tracking every bite of food that's gone into my mouth, with the exception noted below:

My birthday (one day in which I had, as I remember, pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast, no lunch, and fish and chips + a couple of donuts for dinner).

And that's it. I don't drink alcohol. No takeaways. No restaurants. Nothing that I didn't weigh, portion, and track faithfully. Even when I bake or make something from a recipe, every ingredient is weighed and the calories per serving calculated. I skip breakfast during the week and have normal, healthy food and smallish portions for lunch and dinner.

I eat, on average, 1,100 calories per day. I have a desk job but I walk for 30 minutes to an hour nearly every day.

Before this, my diet was pretty bad - takeaways 3-4 times per week, pastries for breakfast, sandwich with crisps and chocolate at lunch, biscuits whenever I felt like it- probably more than 2,500 calories most days (I'm 5'3" so that is A LOT).

And now, nine months later, I have gone from 13 stone to 12.3 stone. That's a grand total of ten pounds lost on an extremely restricted diet- and it was all within the first two months.

Please don't give me diet advice - no, I'm not in 'starvation mode' (because that's a complete myth). No, I don't need to 'cut carbs'. Seriously, I do not want your advice. What I want is to point out that, the next time you're tempted to say something asinine like 'it's just about calories in vs calories out' or to dismiss or vilify or judge someone based on their weight, to realise that the human body is not a two-stroke lawnmower engine and weight, food, activity, hormones, age, genes, and a million other factors are at play. Losing weight isn't simple and even with all the willpower in the world - which I have demonstrated - it isn't always possible.

I'm not giving up. I have gotten used to eating this way and I actually feel like my blood sugar is more regulated (no 'sinking feeling' a few hours after eating a big lunch, for example) and I know that as I get older, it will be better to, at the very least, not get any fatter. That, at least, I can probably do. But nothing short of eating less than 1000 calories per day or surgery or medication are going to get me to a 'normal' BMI.

@Wroxie

I absolutely love as in absolutely hate that a woman can't just say what she means without weaselly sweetie-pie accommodating language without being seen as aggressive or hostile.

100% this with bells on. And you’re quite right about the weight thing too.

I thought Wroxie was aggressive and hostile before knowing her sex. Because she was being aggressive and hostile.

reducing calories never leads to weightloss

Obviously when I specifically stated I used to be very thin through disordered eating, I was referring to copious pizza and cake. 🙄
Not the fact that I had personal experience of severe calorie restriction. No, I’m just fat, greedy and stupid, obvs. Never could I have not been such in the past, that’s way too complex for your overly simplistic mind to think about.

Do you know that it’s relatively common for recovered anorexics to become obese?

@Eckhart

I thought Wroxie was aggressive and hostile before knowing her sex. Because she was being aggressive and hostile.

Oh she was, but I can definitely emphasise with why!

Weight loss is complex because there are so many factors. However, there are usually solutions to plateauing problems and ones which don't involve feeling completely starving hungry all the time. I think there is genuine frustration when people have personal experience of overcoming the problems and overcoming them and people dismiss these solutions without even entertaining the thought of trying them. The solution is dismissed and furthermore implied to be positively dangerous and harmful. I have felt shamed before when I posted what I ate. People criticised me for eating too many green vegetables!As if all they want is validation for giving up.

Do you know that it’s relatively common for recovered anorexics to become obese?

there has also been enough studies about previously starved people struggling all their life with their weight once they go back to a "normal" life.

But it never meant you'd become obese out of thin air.

Your anger is valid! It sucks that you followed all the advice for weight loss for months and aren’t seeing improvements. I totally agree that people morally judge you since they think it is all down to willpower. It’s because almost everyone believes that weight loss is governed by a simple equation of calories in minus calories out.

If you ever return to this thread, look up Jason Fung. It’s a hormonal issue - you’re probably insulin resistant from your previous poor diet. The solution is to find ways to crank down your insulin levels. The easiest way to do it is intermittent fasting.

I’m not arguing I became obese off thin air, but I’d need a time machine to undo it ever happening

That is, the argument for how someone puts weight on vs how they lose it, aren’t the same argument but in reverse. Iyswim?

But it is still calories in versus calories out. You obviously aren’t using much energy every day.

Therefore if you want to lose weight as opposed to maintain you need to exercise more or eat less

@Dishwashersaurous You didn’t read the memo did you, keep up. Calories in v calories out is now known to not be correct

@dontdisturbmenow 3500-4000 is not hard if you have an active lifestyle. I burn about 1800 cals just living and breathing. A lot more with my active job and workout every other day.

@Looneytune253, that's interesting. I burn about 2500. I run 10k everyday and walk 5k. I am wondering what your weight, height, age and fat percentage is now! Maybe I am remarkably sedentary apart from the walking and running...

It's not that CIvCO is incorrect. It is true for everybody that if they eat more food than their body needs, they will store some of it as fat. That doesn't change, regardless of what you eat. But it's far to gross a measure of a very finely tuned instrument.

What does change is how we process the calories, and that makes ENORMOUS differences to how much of it we store as fat, and how much fat it allows us to lose.

There are other ways our bodies deal with not having enough calories than weight loss. They can shut down peripheral functions, for example, like keeping nails healthy, or they can simply barely give us enough energy to get by. That's why some people who are eating a calorie restricted diet feel so shitty. A body will do a lot to stop itself losing fat. It wants fat. It feels safe wearing fat.

A calorie is a unit of energy, not a unit of fat or weight. If you give your body a calorie, there's a lot of different things it can do with it. It doesn't just mean 'you are 1 calorie fatter'. It's not that simple. It can mean 'Your brain works better' or 'your hair looks healthier' or 'you'll get over your cold a bit faster'.

CIvCO is too simplistic. When you give your body a calorie, or too many calories, or not enough calories, there is a massive equation that takes place that doesn't mean your body has to do a calorie's worth of exercise to avoid putting a calorie's worth of fat on. Do people really think that the human body is that simple?

Agree see an endocrinologist as that is highly unusual. You could be quite ill and not know, my brother in law was.

@namochangoro I am heavy so that's part of it. 225lb but more than half of that is muscle. My body is weird!! Very heavy but 'only' size 16.

Thanks, that makes sense**@Looneytune253**.

@Eckhart I think my previous description was possibly over simplistic, of course your body uses the calories you eat for all sorts of essential functions, but if you routinely give it far too many calories, so more than is needed for essential functions every day over a long period of time, it will generally put those calories somewhere safe until you eventually need them. I don't hate my body for being the clever little machine it is

3500-4000 is not hard if you have an active lifestyle. I burn about 1800 cals just living and breathing
It really show how different we are. I will burn 1400 if I'm lucky doing little. I then burn about 350 an hour doing quite intense exercise so would need to work out almost 8 hours to burn 3000 calories which is clearly not realistic everyday.

I don't think it's common at all to burn that much for a woman even with an active life.

How are you measuring how many calories you're burning, @dontdisturbmenow?

For intense exercise, 350 per hour seems low.

@dontdisturbmenow it was in response to someone asking how I managed that many that's all. But as I've already said

That's mainly because I'm very very heavy. We burn cals according to our size too.

Also @Eckhart I don't think 350 cals is an unrealistic figure. When I do my classes i burn 3/4/500 cals but I'm much bigger so that's probably accurate for a smaller person

It's not size relative. The word 'intense' is the variable. A less fit person might find a lesser activity intense, but 'intense' exercise burns around 600kcal p/h. That's what makes it intense. The fact that it takes a lot of effort. Not how hard it is objectively.

I’ve only read some comments OP but you are 100% right. Insulation resistance and other metabolic/hormone related conditions can mean that some people are the crème de la creme at using ‘calories in’ efficiently and holding on to weight. These are the body types that would survive a world ending disaster that wiped out most food supplies. The calories in/calories out model is flawed for these because they body just ramps up efficiency of calorie usage as they cut down calories meaning that to lose weight they have to cut calories to such a low level that it is not compatible with a remotely pleasant or even normal existence.