... 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.

I'm with you OP - I eat one small meal a day and my BMI is about 36. I can just about lose maybe 10lbs of bloat when I lowcarb, but then it stops completely. I've done it long term and I've tracked everything in vs out. I don't need advice on dieting from people who are not in my exact body, they simply think I am lying.

I am disabled and on a load of various meds, but my bloods have all been checked and are apparently perfectly normal. I dispute this, as I'm sure I'm heading into menopause, and my dad has hashimotos, but anywho...

I remember my Nan (dads mum) existing on cups of tea and one meal, while she was a size 24. It was only when she was really ill that she lost any weight.

@Wroxie

Did you open up you diary on something like my fitness pal? It's easy to miss logging errors or problems

Although in all honesty Your margin for error is so small at your height thats a pretty awesome rate of loss any way.

I'm not sure why you don't think it isnt working. It clearly is.

Maybe the OP is angry because loads of folk are clearly either not reading her posts at all, or ignoring them?

OP, I totally agree with you. Calories in/calories out is bollocks. I think there's a lot more to the equation, as you say. If I cut sugar and a lot of processed carbs (eg bread and pasta, but not potatoes) then I lose weight.

I absolutely agree with you. Different approaches work for different people in my experience.

I don't find this at all unusual and I do "believe in calories". I exercise for only about an hour a day - the rest of the day I am at a desk. The calories I expend are minimal. On 1200 calories a day I slowly put on weight. I'm not sure why this would be strange.

OP could not agree more.
Diets don't work. There is a lot of evidence to support this. As soon as a body is calorie restricted for a time period it will seek to regain weight.
Body heat generation changes, the amount of calories removed from food changes.
The biggest predictor of weight gain is an attempt at weight loss.
The only thing that works is bariatric surgery.

@PurpleDaisies yes I am a bit angry about the discrimination against and stereotyping of and vilification of people based on their weight and the fact that every fat person is just seen to be lazy and lacking in willpower when that's clearly not the case. That's the point of this whole post. I know you think you're terribly funny but you're just being nasty. You can literally close this thread and do anything else if you can't think of a constructive way to participate.

you didn't gain weight on 2500 kcal/day but you didn't lose weight on 1100 kcal/day? I can't explain that biologically.

OP, I'm with you. I have to drop to below 800 calories a day to lose even 1lb a week. It's soul destroying (and therefore I don't and am overweight!). Your weight loss of about 1lb each 4 weeks on 1100 a day with absolutely no cheating is probably similar to what my body would do.

No one will believe you though. You'll be accused of cheating, of not understanding or forgetting to count your alcohol or even of secretly eating. Nope, I do none of the above, I just have a body that doesn't work quite the same as the average one.

[quote Wroxie]@PurpleDaisies yes I am a bit angry about the discrimination against and stereotyping of and vilification of people based on their weight and the fact that every fat person is just seen to be lazy and lacking in willpower when that's clearly not the case. That's the point of this whole post. I know you think you're terribly funny but you're just being nasty. You can literally close this thread and do anything else if you can't think of a constructive way to participate.[/quote]
No, I wasn’t being nasty. Genuinely, exercise is a great way of dealing with anger.

I was referring to the way every single response if yours has been aggressive and negative. You’ve ignored everyone who has agreed with you.

@lljkk I mean I wasn't born weighing 13 stone at 5'3" lol, my terrible diet was what got me into this state in the first place, innit?

Doesn't bariatric surgery restrict the amount of food you can eat? So forcing you to go on a very low calorie diet?

And diets do work. What happens in that people stop following them and go back to eating as normal and wonder why they put the weight back on.

OP if you are being 100% truthful with yourself (cos let's face it it matters not a jot to us lot) then get yourself to a doctor to see if there's a problem.

Calories in vs calories out is a basic fact of life

This is simply not true and why a lot of people fail to lose weight on "a diet". You can take in 1000s of calories in fat on the atkins diet and still lose weight. Remember back to the F plan diet back decades ago....the USA Cane Sugar association paid the Nixon government a lot of money to omit sugar from the first USA obesity guidelines. White sugar and wheat are absolutely the devil's work. All calories are not created equally.

@TooExtraImmatureCheddar

Maybe the OP is angry because loads of folk are clearly either not reading her posts at all, or ignoring them?

OP, I totally agree with you. Calories in/calories out is bollocks. I think there's a lot more to the equation, as you say. If I cut sugar and a lot of processed carbs (eg bread and pasta, but not potatoes) then I lose weight.

Calories in / calories out is science and works for absolutely everyone, even dogs cats and mice. If you use more energy than you consume, you will lose weight.

Oh I can gain weight fine, I just can't lose it on even what many people already think is starvation (OMAD) - I'm not hungry at all, ever. I only eat that OMAD as my DW encourages it, as she gets scared that I'm not eating. At some point soon I'm going to try eating to my appetite and see just how little that actually is.

Of course this is extra complicated by the fact I had very disordered eating when I was younger - verging on anorexic. Don't want to trigger that!

Citation needed for these people eating many 1000s of calories and weight falling off. Also loads of people eat sugar and white carbs without any weight issues at all - mostly because of calories in/calories out.

And exercise.....you will only lose weight if you are having your pulse rate 60% or so more than it should be to be in the fat burning zone. There is nothing bad about exercise but you wont lose weight only through exercise unless you are an Olympic Athlete and strenuously working out every day for hours on end. I too am a nurse and have nursed many cancer patients towards the end of their life - not eating does make you lose weight!

Fine then: no diets don't work, so give up. Not really sure what the point of posting is when you're just hostile to people!

It's not so much about calories, it's about what your body does with those calories. It's about how the foods you eat trigger the release of the appetite regulation hormones leptin, ghrelin and insulin. You are a complex biochemical and metabolic being, and whilst the basic underlying laws of thermodynamics obviously apply, a lot of complex biochemistry happens along the way... you have an energy partition system and the body decides whether to use the energy from food for immediate use on the fly, or put it into longer term storage in the form of adipose fat around the essential organs (think solar panels powering the immediate electricity needs in the house -AC, vs putting it into battery storage to use later overnight - DC).

The key thing is to put the right fuel into your body... more meat, fish, non starchy vegetables, eggs, butter, full fat yoghurt etc... real, single ingredient foods and less of the hyperprocessed foods we're not evolved to eat such as sugar, seed oils and over processed starches.

I have to eat similar calories to you, between 900-1100 to lose. I'm 5ft 10. It might be you have to drop lower but I would definitely see your GP, I have hashimotos which affects it

You cannot create chemical energy.

If I give my body 1000j of chemical energy my body only has access to 1000j of chemical energy.

Your body cannot create mass out of thin air.

Have you had your BMR tested?

YANBU. I'm in a similar position. I've set my calorie intake at 1,200 max a day (my TDEE is supposedly 1,800 so this theoretically a good deficit).

Admittedly I've only been doing this since September, but have barely nudged the scales at a 3lb loss. I've started exercising properly before I changed my eating habits. Minimum of 10,000 steps every day and at least 30 minutes hard slog exercise 3 times a week.

I feel better both physically and mentally, but in terms of not being obese the whole thing is currently failing.

Like you @Wroxie I'm sticking with this. It's clearly healthier for me, I just wish the scales (and my body) would reflect the massive changes I've made to both my diet and exercise levels but the next person who tells me to "eat less, move more" might end up with an earful instead of a long suffering grimace smile.

OP you will at least be healthier now than you were and will not continue to gain weight as I'm sure you were.
You could try doing more exercise to further increase the calorie deficit.

not all calories are equal

eating a kitkat and eating 2 bananas is not and will never give your body the same fuel regardless of the fact that the "calories" are the same or similar

www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-reveals-why-calorie-counts-are-all-wrong/

I had a wonky thyroid and I ate and ate and ate and was getting thinner and thiner. It got to the point I was eating in excess of 4000 calories a day and the scales where getting lighter, eventually I was hospitalised as I was very poorly. Thyroids can go wonky both ways so its worth getting it checked out. Don't have a thyroid any longer and just take thyroxine at a prescribed amount.